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(21) he is serving under the standard of Batman. |
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(22) he has a homosexual relation with Batman. |
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(23) he got a B.A. at the Gotham City College. |
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(24) it is a seal (this choice being verisimilar only for a lexicalist). |
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I realize that there is a difference between the expectations displayed vis-à-vis a fabula and those aroused by the manifestation of the lexeme /bachelor/. In this second case the interpreter only expects to ascertain which of the already coded senses of /bachelor/ (young knight, unmarried, B.A., unmated seal) will be textually actualized. But are we sure that in the course of a story something different happens? A story actualizes pre-overcoded narrative functions, that is, intertextual frames. |
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The way in which semantic disclosures and narrative forecasts are strictly interdependent, and co-dependent on the same storage of encyclopedic knowledge, is demonstrated very well by the following (rather elementary) example. |
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In Cyrus S. Sulzberger's The Tooth Merchant, the narrator begins by saying that he was sleeping in Istanbul in a brothel with a prostitute, Iffet, |
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(25) when suddenly there was a scream at the door followed by a thump on the stairs. "Aaaaaaiiiiieee, the American Fleet," moaned Iffet, hauling the flyblown sheet about her head as the police burst in. |
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We have the chance to have also at our disposal the Italian translation of this text. A translation is an actualized and manifested interpretation therefore an important witness for our purposes. The Italian translation reads as follows: |
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(26) quando fummo risvegliati di soprassalto da strilli giù in basso, seguiti da uno scalpiccio su per le scale. "Ahiahiai, la flotta americana!" gemette Iffet coprendosi la testa col lenzuolo. Irruppe invece la polizia. |
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The translator (hereafter our Model Reader) has made the following first inference: that the narrator is speaking in the first person, that he was sleeping, and that he is able to report about the scream means that he has been awakened by the scream. From a short surface microproposition, the Model Reader has extrapolated a more analytical macroproposition: x was sleeping, then there was a scream, then x woke up, then x heard the scream. The reference was to the common frame «to be suddenly awakened by a noise» (involving a very subtle time order, with relations of contemporaneity). In fact, why at the manifestation level was the scream 'sudden'? Sudden with respect to whom? This /suddenly/ is a hypallage; it is not the scream which is sudden, it is the experience of it undergone by the narrator (rhetorical overcoding). |
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The English text says that there was a scream at the door. Which door? The one of the room where the narrator was sleeping
20 or the one down- |
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