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external circumstances are detected, they are inserted into box 1, to be transformed into pieces of encyclopedic knowledge (contextual and circumstantial selections, frames, and any other type of overcoding). |
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0.5. Bracketed Extensions |
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As far as the reader recognizes the existence of certain individuals (be they animate or not) furnished with certain properties (among which the possible properties of performing certain actions), he probably makes some indexical presuppositions, that is, he assigns those subjects to a possible world. In order to apply the information provided by the lexicon, he assumes a transitory identity between this world and the world of his experience (reflected by the lexicon). |
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If, by chance, in the course of his decoding, the reader discovers some discrepancy between the world as pictured by the social lexicon and the world as pictured by the idiolectal lexicon of the text (for instance, a stoneinanimatehas the property of speaking), he practically 'jumps' at box 10 or puts the extension into brackets, that is, he suspends his disbelief, waiting for more semantic information, to be actualized at box 4 (discursive structures). |
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0.6. Discursive Structures |
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0.6.1. Codes, Overcoding, Frames |
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At box 4 the reader confronts the text linear manifestation with the system of codes and subcodes provided by the language in which the text is written (box 1). Such a system is presupposed by the present research in the format of an encyclopedia, structured as the Model Q proposed in Theory (2.12). |
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This begins the transformation of the expression into content, word by word, phrase by phrase. In a frenzy of lexicological optimism, one could say that the virtual context of every verbal expression is already established by the lexicon and that the reader has nothing to do but pick up there what must be correlated to the expressions. Everyone knows that things are not that simple (see Theory, 2.15): even a comprehensive theory of the 'amalgamation' between sememes meets with the problem of 'contextual meaning'. |
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I do not believe, howeveras many text theorists maintainthat there is an incurable gap between lexical meaning and textual meaning. I do not believe, since semantic compositional analysis proved to be unsuccessful in explaining complex processes of textual amalgamation, that it should be completely substituted by an autonomous set of textual rules providing the final interpretation of lexical meanings. I believe, on the contrary, that, if a text can be generated and interpreted, this ought to |
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