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Page 178
transformed into the representation of the action required to produce this object (therefore: not knife but to make a knife). (iii) A complete semantic theory should also take into account syncategorematic terms such as preposition and adverb (for, to, below, while, and so on). According to the research of many scholars (Leech, Apresjan, and others), it seems that this is possible, but we are far from recognizing that those researches are to be considered both satisfactory and definitive (for all these problems see Eco, 1976). I think that an exploration into Peirce's theory of interpretant can strongly help to improve all these approaches.
7.1.3.
There is, in any case, a sort of gap between contemporary compositional analysis and Peirce's semiotic account of interpretants. Contemporary analyses are concerned mainly with a semantics of verbal languages, whereas Peirce was dealing with a general semiotics concerning all types of sign. I have elsewhere demonstrated that Peirce offers the theoretical opportunity of extending the problem of compositional analysis to every semiotic phenomenon (Eco, 1976), including images and gestures.
Nevertheless, in order to maintain a certain parallelism between the two poles of our inquiry, I shall limit the subject of sections 7.2 and 7.3 to Peircean proposals and examples concerning verbal language, even though this methodological decision obliges me to underestimate the important relationship between symbols, icons, and indices. Someone could object that this limitation is imposed by the very nature of my subject matter: Peirce has said that only symbols (not icons and indices) are interpretable. "Pragmaticism fails to furnish any translation of meaning of a proper name or other designation of an individual object" (5.429); qualities have "no perfect identities, but only likenesses, or partial identities" (1.418). Only symbols seem to be instances of genuine Thirdness (since they can be interpreted), whereas icons are qualitatively degenerate and indices are reactionally degenerate, both depending on something else without any mediation (the icon from a quality, the index from an object) (2.92 and 5.73). Moreover, "it is not all signs that have logical interpretants, but only intellectual concepts and the like" (5.482).
I think, however, that the context of Peirce's thought happily contradicts these statements. 1 It is difficult to assume, as Peirce does in 1.422 and 1.447, that qualities are always general without asserting that they can and should be in some way defined and interpreted. And as far as icons are concerned, it should be remembered that the possibility of making deductions by observing those icons which are called diagrams depends on the fact that diagrams can be interpreted and do arouse interpretants in the mind of their interpreters.2

 
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