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semantics and only from Peirce's point of view can many problems of contemporary text theories be satisfactorily solved.
According to the principles of compositional analysis, a semiotic expression (be it a verbal item or any type of physical utterance) conveys, according to linguistic conventions, an organized and analyzable content, formed by the aggregation (or hierarchy) of semantic features. These features constitute a system, either closed or open, and belong to different contents of different expressions in different arrangements. Compositional analysis should describe and define a virtually infinite number of contents by means of a possibly finite ensemble of features, but this exigency of economy gives rise to many aporias.
If the features constitute a finite set of metasemiotic constructions, then their mode of describing a virtually infinite amount of contents sounds rather disappointing. By such features as 'human', 'animate', 'masculine', or 'adult' (see Chomsky), one can distinguish a bishop from a hippopotamus, but not a hippopotamus from a rhinoceros. If, on the contrary, one elaborates more analytical metasemiotic features such as 'not-married' or 'seal' (as it happens in the interpretative perspective of Katz and Fodor), one is obliged to foresee an incredible number of other features such as 'lion', 'bishop', or 'with two eyes', therefore losing universality and running the risk that the set of metasemiotic features contains as many items as the language to be analyzed.
Moreover, it is hard to establish which kind of hierarchy these features should be accorded to. A simple relation of embedding from genus to species can help only to a certain extent. It is, for example, obviously important to know that a schooner is a sailing ship, that a sailing ship is a vessel, a vessel a boat, and a boat a vehicle (marine), but this kind of classification does not distinguish a schooner from a brigantine, since it disregards other features such as the form of the sails and the number of the masts. Provided this requirement is satisfied, it remains to be known what purposes a brigantine or a schooner serves.
As a further criticism we can add that a compositional analysis in terms of universal features does not say satisfactorily in which linguistic environments the item can be inserted without producing ambiguity. There are rules of subcategorization, establishing the immediate syntactic compatibility of a given item, and there are selectional rules establishing some immediate semantic compatibility, but these instructions do not go beyond the normal format of a dictionary. Some scholars have proposed a semantic representation with the format of an encyclopedia, and this solution seems to be the only one capable of conveying the whole information entailed by a given term; but the encyclopedic representation excludes the possibility of establishing a finite set of metasemiotic features and makes the analysis potentially infinite.

 
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