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in fairy tales); (ii) some individuals are selected and introduced through a series of descriptions hung to their proper names and endowing them with certain properties; (iii) the sequence of actions is more or less localized in space and time; (iv) the sequence of actions is considered finite there is a beginning and an end; (v) in order to tell what definitely happened to Clarissa, the text is supposed to start from an initial state of affairs concerning Clarissa and to follow her through certain changes of state, offering to the addressee the possibility of wondering about what could happen to Clarissa in the next step of the narration; (vi) the whole course of events described by the novel can be summarized and reduced to a set of macropropositions, to the skeleton of a story (or fabula), thus establishing a further level of the text which should not be identified with the so-called linear text manifestation.
Nevertheless, a counterfactual conditional differs from a piece of fiction only insofar as in the first case the addressee is requested to cooperate more actively in the realization of the text he receivesto make on his own the story that the text has simply suggested.
In the course of the following paragraphs, I shall also examine some cases in which a nonnarrative text seems not to fit my model. We shall see that we can either reduce the model or expand certain virtualities of the text. It is usually possible to transform a nonnarrative text into a narrative one.
Certainly, narrative textsespecially fictional onesare more complicated than are many others and make the task of the semiotician harder. But they also make it more rewarding. That is why, probably, today one learns about textual machinery more from the researchers who dared to approach complex narrative texts than from those who limited themselves to analyzing short portions of everyday textuality. Maybe the latter have reached a higher degree of formalization, but the former have provided us with a higher degree of understanding.
0.3.2. Textual Levels: A Theoretical Abstraction
The notion of textual level is a very embarrassing one. Such as it appears, in its linear manifestation, a text has no levels at all. According to Segre (1974:5) 'level' and 'generation' are two metaphors: the author is not 'speaking', he 'has spoken'. What we are faced with is a textual surface, or the expression plane of the text. It is not proved that the way we adopt to actualize this expression as content mirrors (upside down) that adopted by the author to produce such a final result. Therefore the notion of textual level is merely theoretical; it belongs to semiotic metalanguage.
In Figure 0.3 the hierarchy of operations performed to interpret a text is posited as such for the sake of comprehensibility. I have borrowed many suggestions from the model of Petofi's * TeSWeST (Text-Struktur

 
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