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Alphonse Allais), the title of the first chapter introduces a /Monsieur/ and a /Dame/. In the first lines of the text a given Raoul and a given Marguerite are introduced. Resorting to an onomastic dictionary, the reader interprets them as two human beings, respectively male and female. An overcoded rule tells him that (irony or other figure excepted) the title of a chapter usually announces the content of it. The reader thus co-refers /Monsieur/ to Raoul and /Dame/ to Marguerite and detects that they are adult and presumably belong to a bourgeois milieu. |
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The text continues by saying that Raoul and Marguerite are /married/. The text does not say that they are married to each other, but the Model Reader has no doubt about this. He is in fact resorting to overcoded stylistic rules. Allais knows that his Model Reader does not need more information about this marriage. When a speaker wants to trick us with such a sort of overcoding, he makes it explicit. To quote a joke of Woody Allen's: "I desperately wish to return to the womb. Anybody's." |
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0.6.1.5. Inferences by Common Frames. |
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In Un drame bien parisien, chapter 2, Raoul and Marguerite, very jealous of each other, are quarreling. At a certain point Raoul pursues Marguerite, and the French text says as follows: |
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(5) La main levée, l'oeil dur, la moustache telle celle des chats furibonds, Raoul marcha sur Marguerite. . .. |
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The reader understands that Raoul raises his hand to strike, even though the linear text manifestation shows neither the fact nor the intention. In fact, the English translator of the story (see Appendix 2) translates "hand raised to strike." It is a correct interpretation. However, were Raoul a senator at a legislative session, a raised hand would mean a request to speak. Since he is a husband quarreling with his wife, we make the only possible inference (supported also by the other characteristics of Raoul manifested by the text: remorseless gaze, bristling moustache . . .). But the inference was possible only because the reader was resorting to the conventional frame «violent altercation». |
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According to current research both in Artificial Intelligence and in text theories, a frame looks like something half-way between a very comprehensive encyclopedic sememic representation expressed in terms of a case grammar (see Theory, 2.11.1) and an instance of overcoding. Probably this notion is still an empirical one (and as such it is used in Artificial Intelligence) to be better defined within the framework of a semiotic theory (by distinguishing between coded and overcoded frames). But for the present purposes it can be used without further technicalities. A frame is "a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation like being in a certain kind of living room or going to a child's birthday party" (Winston, 1977:180) and frames are "(cognitive) knowledge repre- |
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