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tion, all the levels and sublevels of my diagram (which are in fact mere metatextual 'boxes') are interconnected in a continuous coming and going. The cooperation of the interpreter at the lower levels can succeed only because some hypotheses which concern upper levels (and vice versa) are hazarded. The same happens also for a generative process: frequently an author makes decisions concerning the deep semantic structure of his story only at the moment in which he chooses at the lexical level, for merely stylistic reasons, a given expression. Likewise the arrows do not mark any idealized temporal and logical process of interpretation, but rather show the interdependences among 'boxes'.
Figure 0.3 thus considers (metalinguistically) levels of possible abstraction at which the cooperative activity can take place. Therefore, in order to avoid any misunderstanding, instead of speaking of textual 'levels' (a metaphor which inevitably risks suggesting a hierarchy of concrete operations), I shall speak of 'boxes', so referring only to specific points of my visualized theoretical postulation.
The only way in which Figure 0.3 presumably portrays a concrete case of textual interpretation is in the fact that it necessarily starts from box 3 (linear text manifestation) and that one cannot jump from box 3 to the others without relying at least on box 1 (the system of codes and sub-codes indispensable to transforming the expression plane into the content plane).
0.4. Linear Text Manifestation and Circumstances of Utterance
0.4.1.
I call linear text manifestation the text such as it appears verbally with its lexematic surface. The reader applies to these expressions a given code or system of codes and subcodes, to transform them into the first levels of content.
Text (3) is an excerpt from Der grosse Lalula by Christian Morgenstern:
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(3) Kroklowafgi? Semememi!
Seikronto prafriplo.
Bifzi, bafzi; hulalomi . . .
quasti besti bo . . .
This text has a linear manifestation (expression) to which no content can be ordered, since the author did not refer to any existing code (I am excluding for the sake of simplicity phonic connotations as well as the halo of 'literariness' acquired by this pre-Dada experiment).
Text (4) is an excerpt from Toto-Vaca by Tristan Tzara:
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(4) ka tangi te kivi
kivi

 
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