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Chapter Seven
Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness:
Signs as Texts and Texts as Signs |
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7.1. The Analysis of Meaning |
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An intensional semantics is concerned with the analysis of the content of a given expression. This kind of study has assumed in the last two decades two forms, complementary and/or alternative to each other: the interpretative analysis with the format of a compositional spectrum of markers and the generative analysis in form of predicates and arguments. While the former approach seems to be exclusively concerned with the meaning of elementary lexical entries, the latter seems to fit the needs of a textual analysis which considers both the semantic and the pragmatic aspect of discourses. |
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I think, however, that such a clear-cut opposition should not be established. As it is proposed in Chapter 8 of this book, a sememe is in itself an inchoative text, whereas a text is an expanded sememe. The author who has more clearly advocated such an assumption (implicitly as well as explicitly) is Charles Sanders Peirce. Some elements of Peirce's thought can be reexamined in the light of such theoretical perspectives: Peirce's theory of interpretant cannot but lead to a form of meaning analysis which fits both the requirements of an interpretative and a generative |
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A shorter version of this chapter was presented at the Christian Gauss Seminars, Princeton University, November 1976. The main lines of the research were previously advanced in papers presented at the Charles Sanders Peirce Symposium, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1975 (''Peirce's Notion of Interpretant,'' MLN 91, no. 6), and the C. S. Peirce Bicentennial International Congress, Amsterdam, 1976. This chapter reproduces, with minor revisions and additions, "Peirce and Contemporary Semantics," VS 15 (1976). |
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