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paragraphs and other graphic devices; in the roman-feuilleton, the temporal distribution by instalments) or at the surface intensional level (explicit warnings or connotative hints, innuendos, allusions preparing states of suspense). It is, in other words, the plot to display all the devices able to elicit expectations at the level of the fabula.
To expect means to forecast: the reader collaborates in the course of the fabula, making forecasts about the forthcoming state of affairs. The further states must prove or disprove his hypotheses (see Vaina, 1976; 1977).
The end of the text not only confirms or contradicts the last forecasts, but also authenticates or inauthenticates the whole system of long-distance hypotheses hazarded by the reader about the final state of the fabula.
In Figure 0.3 this dialectic of forecasts and proofs is scored at box 7, half-way between boxes 5 and 10, which concern extensions. This dialectic is in fact unpredictably distributed all along the interpretative journey, but it definitely concerns the world structure of the text, that is, the deep extensional level, and only at that level can it be rigorously analyzed.
0.7.2.2.
In order to make forecasts which can be approved by the further course of the fabula, the Model Reader resorts to intertextual frames. Consider text (5) (see 0.6.1.5). As Raoul raises his hand, the reader understands that Raoul wants to beat Marguerite (semantic disclosure) and expects that he will actually beat Marguerite. This second interpretative movement has nothing to do with the actualization of discursive structures: it represents a forecast activated at the level of fabula (by the way, it will be disproved by the course of the story: Raoul will not actually beat Marguerite).
The reader was encouraged to activate this hypothesis by a lot of already recorded narrative situations (intertextual frames). To identify these frames the reader had to 'walk', so to speak, outside the text, in order to gather intertextual support (a quest for analogous 'topoi', themes, or motives). 18
I call these interpretative moves inferential walks: they are not mere whimsical initiatives on the part of the reader, but are elicited by discursive structures and foreseen by the whole textual strategy as indispensable components of the construction of the fabula.
Frequently, the fabula is made also of presupposed macropropositions already actualized by other texts, which the reader is invited to insert into the story so that they can be taken for granted in its following steps. It is a common styleme in many traditional novels for a text to say "Our reader has surely already understood that . . ." while untold phrases con-

 
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