Noetic Constitution, Open and Closed: The Structures of Language

The l-trichotomy of context is the vital link that provides the two degenerate (M-0) trichotomies with their reason for being. By the time context has been thoroughly explored, the Iconic or lexical metaphor will have been replaced by a structural counterpart which, literally, cannot “destruct.” Although I entertained the idea of saving the traditional metaphor by the means of a quantitative approach that measures frequency of use as a corollary of Is and Ought leveling, such results would be of only limited benefit. All that is assessed in this type of pursuit concerns sensation of familiarity with certain contents instead of grappling with genuine functions of signifying.

Full signifying leads to the noetic trichotomy which always precipitates contextualization through the agency of acts of meaning whose products, the explicit and implicit contents, have been examined at the degenerate noematic level. In contrast to the last dyadic trichotomy, this one is no longer in the shape of a triangle and yet appears “triadic” through the three strands it comprises. Insofar as all three strands draw on M-0 contents of the first hyletic-noematic trichotomies by departing in confluence from the Symbol, they are identical in source. At the same time, each strand has to brand its signs, beginning with the Qualisign as “Rhemic, ” for example, since it represents a structure and as such a function determining the essence of the selected constituents.

What difference a structure makes the textual analyses should reveal later. For the present, it is more important to note the separation of the strands, which characterizes this trichotomy as “open.” The open aspect affirms the distinctiveness of each structure. However, in any immediate constitution there must be always teleological “closure,” or no constitutive unit(y) can form and carry the fundamental tasks of meaning and signifying, hence reference and transference in interaction. In fact, context always initiates a series of contacts during constitution. Briefly, the signitive act and its selected entities coincide as, simultaneously, there is interanimation between the entering constituents. The resulting expression is then projected into a setting which, if situational, forces language into contact with a reality-nexus. Since the expression harbors the encoded Referent, an interlocutory partnership presents yet another association with a decoding Recipient.

These contacts have validity for the closed formats which follow the presentation of the open trichotomy, including two of its modified versions, the long range impact and formation of texts. I begin with the open trichotomy.

WILLING
#I-TRICHOTOMY: THIRDNESS

Willing hovers over all three strands as the guiding faculty of this trichotomy, instead of the perceiving and knowing that characterized the first two trichotomies. My occasional reference to an “authorial will” made this connection rather explicit. (See also Hirsch, 1967, pp. 67, 124, 127). Throughout this study, the role of speaker intent has been stressed as the only recourse to initiating thetic I-M-0 generation. The fact that this activity is willed suggests also the inherent spontaneity in language use. Of Thirdness, Peirce has this to say:

Not only will meaning always, more or less, in the long run, mould reactions to itself, but it is only in doing so that its own being exists (Peirce, 1960, pp. 173-174, par. 1.343).

This “molding,” in fact, not only applies to the noetic act imprinted on the noematic content but also to the functional or structural metaphor my theory develops. Such a metaphor will turn out to be a micro-component of the Rheme, which is the literary genre of lyric poetry, it has been placed uppermost at M-level. Below the Rheme appears Dicent at 0-locus. As second literary genre, Dicent presents the fictional alternative to the Rheme. This structure shapes simulated worlds composed solely of words in mimetic augmentation. For “Dicent” as term one might look to Latin “dictio,” the etymological root of “speaking”--not far removed from the type of “telling” that occurs in fictional narration. My genre determination is thus binary, with Dicent comprising such composites as the drama and novel, for example. One nonliterary strand is then covered by what appears lowest on the diagram. That is the structure of Argument at I-locus, where the detailed discussion will begin, working “up” to Dicent and Rheme so that my theory concludes with the non Aristotelian metaphor before the textual analyses illustrate the structures and the adjunct takes over in a final survey of the traditional metaphor.

Argument appears as a rather broad category by representing the one nonliterary use; it must encompass propositions as much as idiomaticity, but, for reasons to be explained, that division suffices. To be sure, critics such as Käte Hamburger (1968, pp. 41-42) have made a valiant attempt to subdivide what she terms a nonliterary “statement-subject” into a “theoretical,” “historical,” and “pragmatic” kind. But the bounds of these distinctions would not jell and in the end became too content oriented to serve units natural to linguistic functioning, as mine have to be. Once basic units are isolated, certainly, there may be a “post-Aristotelian” method for devising further subcategories. To succeed in non-Aristotelian semantics, however, the structures must be identified categorically in their functions, because present studies have not yet come that far.

Since the noetic trichotomy is open, its strands are not in a hierarchic relation of generation, as their M-O-I locus may suggest, and yet each sign characterizes its structure in some way: M may be explicit for the “metaphor” the Rheme harbors, but stands here also for the “materiality” which enhances this structure through the “M-base,” down to the degenerate Qualisigns; 0 becomes just as explicit for the fictive “objects” Dicent produces; I is then left as the locus for Argument. In their equality, however, all three structures originate each time through the teleological closure that goes into effect during constitution, as when the act of meanining as authorial will (I) is corporealized (M) and embodied (0) by selected meanings.

The long-range effect, to be demonstrated next, is emblematic for linguistic historicity. Because this effect is diachronic in application, it has an indirect impact on the disparate structures: today’s lingo may become tomorrow’s fictional or poetic vestige, and (occasionally) vice versa. The ordinary romantic fellow from my previous illustration who becomes a “regular Romeo” has made that descent from exalted dramatic figure at Dicent to a figure of speech at Argument. A simple yet conspicuous case ready to go the other way and make its literary ascent might be the recent Sinsign shrinkage from “Mrs.” and “Miss” to “Ms.” The original salutations embodied something like the old-fashioned “feminine mystique” that kept women in their place by making them hide behind their marital status, not unlike a type of “linguistic veil.”

At this point in time, the “Ms.” has equalized the sexes by corresponding to the male Sinsign “Mr,” which reveals no special marital status. Argument, which possesses the capacity of contact with the extralinguistic reality, registers such changes in attitude first, no doubt strongly boosted by mass media attention. Eventually, though, Dicent and Rheme may carry this Sinsign shrinkage, accordingly dating a novel or poem. Through the long range impact, then, language always possesses an “extrinsic” component, a point I make to counter the simplisitic notions about an exclusive literary “immanence.” However, beyond this diachronic development, there has to be the synchronic affirmation: the “Ms.” Sinsign must be validated--unstarred--as Legisign, hence as a composite yielding an Icon with an inner, indented core, the Index. Even if such an address or salutation possesses a rather narrow circumference of import, it must still cohere within an oppositional system as one accepted synchronic state. Bearing these conditions in mind, I illustrate what is involved.

LONG-RANGE IMPACT

The strands, though appearing “open” in their disparate locus, are rendered in broken lines, with pointers at each end in order to suggest the flux of feedforward and feedback, recording contents for latent M-0 levels and recalling them for the next entry into one of the three structures. Since these tasks are primary to the mediation of the (semiotic) Symbol, this sign (SY) is the only one added from the second trichotomy. Of course, contextualization can only go up one strand at a time. But since modern poetics eschews what P. Goodman (1971, p. 152) has called the poetic “guild language” of elevated diction, no content is barred from gettting to any of the structures, with the Legisign itself preserving the “neutral” validation previously discussed. Next, however, I shall depict what happens to such entries during textual formation.

The old circles from my chapter on ontology for “sorting out” the realities are back again, replete with the overlap for adequation. Those little rectangles suggest loosely “texts” in the shape of pages, as, once more, I attempt to draw the impossible with the one priority in mind, which is to help readers understand what is involved. That goes especially for the non-Aristotelian metaphor which has now been entered at the Rheme. As micro-component of a “poetic intext,” it is governed by a “lyric ego,” which is not a person as such, but the constitutive consciousness suffusing this structure and the special transference on which it subsists irrespective of content. Now, both the literary genres, Rheme and Dicent, remain non adequated: their arrows enter texts directly from language. Thus they must originate at zero-point. Argument, on the other hand, whose arrow is depicted going the opposite way, tends toward the extralinguistic reality once the expression has been formed. The deflected pointer is supposed to illustrate adequation in the acquisition of a reality-nexus, entering the text only from the overlap.

However, it is also important to note the identical origin of all three arrows: they must arise in language, because only ontic heteronomy accounts for a successful manipulation of meaning through reference in transaction with transference, yielding full semantic constitution. The consequences of this finding rectify all the “dilemmas” voiced by (Fregean) critics who do not understand how literary language and/or metaphor “denote.” The evidence is thus cursorily presented that language precipitates these functions, causing the sentence to take shape before it emerges as adequated “judgment,” in contrast to the non adequated “pure” syntax of Dicent, termed “quasi-judgment,” which relies on indigneous denoting. The related terminology suggests that Dicent and Argument also share something, namely the size of the constitutional unit(y)-syntax as opposed to poetic intext-even if Dicent and Rheme remain tied to their non-adequated state. Dicent at 0, wedged as it is between the other two structures, thus partakes of the idiosyncrasies involving both. Exactly what is entailed in all these identities and differences the detailed discussions of each structure will disclose.

Instead, I next demonstrate context in terms of “closure” by the means of three graphs which reveal the shapes of triangles, in that respect matching the M-0 trichotomies of content.

I: THE CLOSED TRIAD-A CONSTITUTIONAL UNIT(Y)

Every time (any) meaning is authorially willed in units consisting of meanings this type of closure must be in effect, regardless of the particular structure. Otherwise no teleology exists for the contents that are being contextualized through the agency of a signitive act. The simplest way to exemplify this triad is to draw on what Ingarden calls an “Einwortsatz,” literally a one-word-sentence (1965, p. 112), which he illustrated with “Fire!” Why is this single word a sentence? In writing, the capitalization at one end and the exclamation mark at the other indicate the beginning and end of a brief sentence. So the vocable “fire” as mere dictionary item is not involved. Rather, an act of meaning (I) has become fused to one centrifugal Icon which unfolds as explicit content (M) in the simultaneous release of a centripetal Index (0), the relevant import. Accordingly, a meaning has been willed, an act exteriorized through the “reference” of this willed Icon which, in a transaction with transference, caused a shift to elicit the relevant connotation.

This one word has become an integral part of a new expression. Indeed, that is how words first become contextualized: through the holophrastic wielding of young speakers (Gumpel, 1974, pp. 172 174) contents are assimilated and the minds of these individuals indented, giving rise to the signitive convolutions discussed. Moreover, a brief expression such as this is highly context-sensitive, necessitating a situational or written setting to boost constitution. For example, if contextualized in an ostensive situation marking a conflagration, the Icon “Fire!” may release the Index “Help!”; if uttered when an order goes out to a firing squad the Index of this Icon may convey “Shoot!” As stated, Iconizing an Index like this is artificial since an implicit meaning has no denotative core and may thus be variously articulated. But the example suffices to stress that each expression would give rise to a different “sentence.” Functionally the expressions are the same, and I use the plural because the exclamation and command would be in essence two disparate sentences, having been willed differently. There is not one “fire” but two such contextualized Icons in their material contents, each of which stays fused to a selectional bias that engenders different implicit meaning. The outcry may be closer to “fire” as noun, the command to “fire” as verb (also in the wider sense of “Open fire!”). No matter; of primary importance is the constitution as meaning arises from each meaning.

To be sure, my example remains somewhat oversimplified-until I discuss contextualization through multiple constituents in subsequent chapters. Structure, too, has been ignored since the heuristic aim here is to demonstrate closure. Normally, “Fire!” must go up one of the three strands after leaving the (semiotic) Symbol, entering either Rheme, Dicent, or Argument--which is something neo-Aristotelians always forget in their exclusive scrutiny of lexical content. The transference they seize on is there anyway, as explained; the structure they ignore will turn out to make all the difference to the contribution each such vestige makes to its context. So, again, the outcry and order in Dicent, for instance, would have more in common as identical structural entities than their difference in content. The same condition has to apply to any non-Aristotelian metaphor.

How easy it is for context to convert a lexical item into a “metaphor” when that flimsily assessed, can be shown too. Thus a speaker utters “Fire!” in the setting of a race and may mean “Go!” or, loosely, “Shoot!” The authorial intent here is to tell the decoding Recipient of the order to start-without expecting firearms to go off. Most people would consider these uses standardized, but those intent on making a case out of deviance in localized spotsighting will never be free of doubt; their metaphor “dies” right under their noses, to put it bluntly, and no “fire” can keep it alive. At this point I have not even mentioned all the Petrarchan figures this Icon has enjoyed as the symbol of romantic passion. Fortunately, non Aristotelian semantics adheres only to criteria of constitution and structure. Of course it seems easy to say that a recognizable poem, for instance, consists categorically of poetic (here Rhemic) elements. But this study probes in minutest detail what it is that makes a language truly “poetic,” even when its surface registers a mundane “Fire!” with a particular context.

Willed meaning, which is the only means of applying language, has to be “symbolic” in contiguity, a relation shown next with the aid of graphs presented by Bense in Sign and Design (1971, pp. 37-38).

I-CONTIGUITIES OF “SYHBOLIC” REFERENCE

This graph displays the “symbolic” gap, with the word in quotes not capitalized because it is not equal to the narrow designation of “Symbol” as the sign occupying noematic Interpretant locus before the eruption of noetic context. Instead, this is the principle governing all volitional, anthropomorphic enterprises; purposive domains draw on a confluence that has been “thrust” together, as went some of that etymology discussed while treating Cassirer, Heidegger, and Peirce. I filled in the symbolic gap with a broken line, to suggest repeated closure through contact, whenever meaning emanates from meanings, as happens here, too. What the symbolic contiguity does not involve is the anomaly in analogy critics try to extract in localized fashion from the lexicon. Bense, using Peirce’s Hypoicon, could not transcend that focus either, be his “Johanna” plain or a “turtledove,” she has undergone reference through transference, in order to be in any context at all. The content by itself thus cannot project a solid idiosyncrasy as “metaphor” if the assessment is to be more than a sheer reaction to sensation. Otherwise Johanna stays too lexical to be worth her mettle, with those adjunctive object-relations Bense posited for this supposed metaphor also unable to penetrate a structure. What happens in semantic generation I demonstrate last in “thetic” closure, relying once more on Bense’s graph (ibid., 1971, p. 37).

I-CONTEXUALIZATION VIA “THETIC” REFRENCE

This graph describes how an act at I seeks out the vocable “fire” in order to name and “materialize” the act at M through Icons, with the intent of conveying either of the connotations of order or command at 0, the context-sensitive level embodied by the Index. Full meaning then issues through an authorial will at I, marked by my broken line. That is how all contextualization proceeds as speakers engage in the selection process, including myself here as author. That is what the lexicon must contribute at M for I in the generation of 0 instead of some dubious “metaphor”--long before it may be equated with conditions in some extralinguistic world, relevant as such a world may become when Argument is involved. All these graphs affirm reference and transference as requisites for incorporating a signitive act . As stated, a new I-M-0 contextualization of contents differs from the linear M-0-1 incline and I-0-M decline of generation (in the Picture of Language) that keep a language alive or cause it to die, much as thetic generation needs that full viability to go properly into effect. With these general aspects considered, an extended correlate will be analyzed next, followed by entry into the first structure under scrutiny, Argument.

Hierarchy of Syntax. Empirical Contact Through Context: Argument

The structures are to be singly introduced, beginning with Argument, after the basic constitutional unit(y) has been analyzed. The diagram of texts revealed that this unit(y) is syntax for two of the structures, Argument and Dicent, in adequated or non-adequated usage. Syntax, however, is given a phenomenological interpretation here, bringing my ideas in line with Ingarden’s “pure-intentional sentence (or syntactic) correlate” (1965, pp. 111, 121, 132-133, 138, passim). Correlation is a term used to describe the duality entailed in an act of meaning (Meinen) and the meanings that signify (Vermeinen) the act. With correlation, pure-intentionality culminates in double intentionality: not what meanings are as vocables but what they become during new constitution receives ontological priority, asserts Ingarden (pp. 124 12 5). The teleology of “closure” that was examined earlier is directly related to syntactic correlation, hence to the transaction between reference and transference.

When this transaction prevails, a sentence has gone into effect. So far a “sentence” has come in just one word, “Fire!” The act of meaning had endowed that word with specific meaning, be this in the sense of the order or the outcry. The order and the outcry constitute separate correlates, each of which harbors a distinctive authorial intent. From a functional standpoint, if not from the aspect of content, both correlates are equal. One reference, the vocable “fire,” had shifted differently as syntactic “Fire!” through the transference each act of meaning precipitated. Any articulation of meaning, however, requires the correlates to enter one of the strands borne by the open trichotomy. For a syntactic correlate, that entry could be either Argument or Dicent.

The holophrastic “Fire!” is now ready to be replaced by a correlate extended to multiple constituents. With several constituents, a syntactic hierarchy arises, according to Ingarden (1965, pp. 79-80). Placing the noun first, he ascribes to this constituent the task of “objectification of the meant,” from “Vergegenständlichung des Vermeinten” in my rather literal translation. As phenomenological principle, the noun does not necessarily equal a traditional part of speech, although its powerful role as a grammatical subject may not be ignored. Rather, the noun is the prime constituent that signifes an act of meaning, if this is not to remain pure spirit. The noun thus initiates the actualization of speaker intent, as the major chosen content. Yet signitive initiation should not be confused with word order. Since the correlate is a holistic unit(y), its first and last elements mutually determine one another; they are integral parts of an organic whole, purposive determinables of their determinant, the act of meaning.

Through the noun, then, an act first engages in the type of “bestowal,” “lending,” or “endowing” (“Verleihung” and “Verleihen,” pp. 69, 103-104, 124-125, passim) which lays the foundation of signifying (“Vermeinen”). The noun bears through its content the authorial will, and in that task reflects also the noetic noematic correlation elucidated in discussing the last two trichotomies. Indeed, so potent is the role of the noun as syntactic agent that my structural metaphors will turn out to have become “nominalized”(Gumpel, 1971), no matter what their surface registers. Even the tradition going back to Aristotle stresses the role of the noun while examining metaphor, although a part of that interest may be traced back to the very inventory of Greek: it had onoma comprise “noun,” “name,” “word,” and “meaning” (Fobes, 1966, p. 286).

Ingarden tries halfheartedly to contrast nominal constituents with “Synkategorematika,” the function words. That is, he stays rather unsure of what he is classifying, mainly because function words, while limited in Iconic-material range, contribute more to syntax than merely filling in gaps for smooth interaction. The “pro-noun,” for example, spelled this way to show that by very definition it covers “for a noun,” absorbs the content of a noun into its own Index and yet, like the noun, often assumes the powerful role of a syntactic subject. To be sure, since the indigenous pointer, the direction-factor, “is” what material/formal contents provide, a pronominal pointer stays delimited in signitive width, assuming instead a stronger functional input.

A similar functional preponderance Ingarden (1965, pp. 76 85) ascribes to the verb. It must be remembered that Ingarden wrote his Literary Work of Art-- cited most so far--in German, although Polish, a Slavic language, was his mother tongue. Both these languages are highly inflectional and thus belong to the synthetic rather than the analytic kind English represents. Not only are nouns variously declined, but finite verbs conform to nouns and pronominal subjects in every grammatical person. That is why “dummy subjects” are inserted when conjugating finite verbs in grammatical paradigms. Not surprisingly, Ingarden (pp. 71-72, 80-81, 83-86) maintains staunchly that all finite verbs possess a more functional direction-factor than nouns-a recursive (rückweisend) kind, in fact, which seeks out the nominal counterpart to interlock with it. This syntactic finitude places verbs below nouns when they reinforce the “meant” at predicate level. Of course, adjectives also adapt their endings to nouns as they shape nominal compounds with articles.

Though fundamentally valid, Ingarden’s syntactic hierarchy stays somewhat open to dispute. It may be pedantic to view verbs that way when, after all, their extended predicates control nouns or pronouns as grammatical objects. The unique power of verbs also surfaced in such holophrastic imperatives as “Fire!” that conveyed the order to shoot. If that capacity is any test, pronouns would be low in syntactic hierarchy, despite their ability to function as subjects within an extended sentence. Ultimately, even a preposition such as “Out!” yields an eloquent command, if more so as elliptical verbal complement for something like “Get out!” Yet a definite article may not appear in the imperative form of “The!” and thus lacks such power of constitution. Indeed, it should be starred for making no sense. Moreover, the hierarchy Ingarden proposes here should not spawn the age-old noun-versus-verb controversy, which leads nowhere. In defense of nouns, my earlier doubling of “wood(s)” demonstrated how nouns controlled adjectival and prepositional qualifiers in their almost unmatched comprehensive width: “in”/“of” or “wooded”/“wooden” are just a couple of the numerous syntactic derivatives that native competence culls from the respective Icons signifying area or substance.

Since I keep function closely allied to structure, I shall use the terminology of Köller (1975, pp. 119-120, 191, passim): function words are to be called “operative signs,” in contrast to (nominal) “eidetic signs.” Köller, in fact, was cited for a possible quantitative stabilization of the traditional metaphor which may be achieved by measuring the level of Is-Values and Ought Values. That is, semantic redundance, the enemy of the traditional metaphor, could then be determined by degrees of frequency of use and the concomitant sensation of familiarity any repeat perfomance causes. That any solution is better than a qualitative lexical one becomes apparent in even this context of the discussion. Thus metaphorical deviance is still gauged so superficially today that it encroaches on the most basic of operative signs, where it may aid neither meaning nor metaphor. Prepositions are not only verbal complements that may elicit commands by themselves as indicated; they apparently become the mainstay of “metaphor” as well. So it is claimed in Embler’s Metaphor and Meaning. In his chapter, “Metaphor in Everyday Speech” (1966, pp. 27-44), he expresses surprise that ordinary speech stays so metaphorical--down to the “up and down” that he lists, one might pun. If metaphor resides in such basic syntactic elements, how far can its bounds extend before attenuating those of meaning as well?

To separate momentarily the “ups” from the “downs,” English permits birds to “rise,” along with successful people, expensive prices, doughs baking in the oven, and even that sun which was cited already to illustrate discrepancies between scientific (heliocentric) fact and (geocentric) sensation. Often a polysemous equivalent of “go up” that manifests two Icons with one indentation can compensate for a verb with a single Icon, as “rise” manifests above. Of course, one word cannot replace another without altering the correlate; that would be proxy-substitution. My point is mainly that these ramified applications with either version--going from voluntary movement in ascension to no genuine movement at all--only affirm the power of meaning as ontic heteronomy, a sphere that breaks the bounds of ontic autonomy in order to create its own bounds, ready to flatten the unique metalinguistic contiguities of its own making.

An essay by Lakoff and Johnson, “Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language,” which is of still more recent vintage than Embler’s work, also covers metaphorical prepositions. For their example of metaphorical everyday speech, the authors (1980, pp. 461-462 ff.) delve into certain English prepositions they term “orientational metaphors.” Among these are figurative vestiges that come in various “spatial orientations” of “up-down,” “front-back,” and “in-out.” Grammarians at large have long plied the rubrics “figurative” or “abstract” to describe prepositions of a nonspatial application. But, logically, if every commonplace crosses bounds between meaning and metaphor with such ease, the critics struggling with their classification land in a labyrinth, probably where the Ingendahl Experiment ended.

Embler (ibid., p. 33) himself makes that evident. In the typical neo-Aristotelian penchant for subverting the very terms tradition tried to standardize, he claims to be taken aback by the following discovery: while everyday language is metaphorical, the poetic kind stays “literal” because its “exact,” “correct,” and “concrete” diction steers clear of the “patois” of “daily talk.” Stylistic preciosity is what Embler tries to address here in twisted terminology. Others did so before him; the Imagists (Pratt, 1963, pp. 22-23) specifically espoused such poetic exactitude. Later followers went on to label the phenomenon “ideogrammatic” (Frye, 1967, pp. 275, 333 334), and then linked the ideogrammatic with the concrete “iconic” (Riffaterre, 1978, p. 54). Yet this study will show that structure through a change of function, rather than explicit content, accounts for all these phenomena. This solution is obviously an improvement over loose descriptions that convert everyday meaning into metaphor and esthetic use into literal exactitude. What might be more constructive for differentiating operative from eidetic signs on the basis of Ingarden’s hierarchy is the following triadic schema of semiotic generation (p. 108).

The operative signs are at M-apex as the most degenerate syntactic elements. The eidetic counterparts separate simultaneously into the greater functional contribution for verbs at 0 and the heightened constitutive prowess for nouns at I. The schema indicates how these constitutents then implement what Ingarden (1965, pp. 119-120, ff.) calls nominal-verbal unfolding and nominal-verbal interlocking. In the very phrasing of the italicised words, the noun is explicitly the first component while the verb follows. Yet the verb engages in that recursive function which, as explained, has its pointer seek out the noun-subject. When that happens, the nominal-verbal direction-factors coincide; explicit centrifugal Icons let the correlate unfold in extension and implicit centripetal Indexes effect a parallel intension as contents band together and release connotations relevant to authorial intent.

Sheer sequence and full signation may not coincide, even if most modern languages bear the standardized word order that commences with the grammatical subject. Whatever the order of the syntagma, the correlate is a product of double-intentionality, as this arises through an act of meaning (I) which has selected certain meanings (M-0). The I-M-0 constants have to be present since they affirm the thetic order of generation, even in the case of the holophrastic imperative. Every articulation of meaning necessitates this order, in contrast to the linear generate M-0-1 incline which keeps the language alive or the opposing I-O-M decline which leads to its demise. Despite its inherent duality, or just because of it, every sentence possesses just one correlate, notes Ingarden (pp. 118-121). The only exception may be an “opalescence” (pp. 149-151, 270), when connotations appear to fluctuate, or oscillate in rich poetic texture. Affirming a single correlate is important, since studies of metaphor based on proxy-tenet theories end up bisecting the organic unity of a correlate.

Ingarden, in fact, lauds the supreme achievement (Leistung) of language for amalgamating an aggregate, the “sentence content” (Satzsinngehalt), into a unified sense, a holistic unit(y) called “Sachverhalt” (pp. 113, 120, 198). The “nominal verbal” makeup suggests the presence of a grammatical subject and object. Indeed, one may look to the type of “ego” and its “object” the phenomenologists had posited also in their ideas of the noetic-noematic correspondence between an act and (its) content. Syntactic processing thus gives rise to an interanimation, which always accompanies the generation of speech. According to Landmann (1963, pp. 121-122), such animation in syntax is rudimentary. The very idea of a “subject” embodies an agent taking over an inanimate “object.” Yet the tradition, all the way back to Latin rhetoric, has plied animation tenaciously to extract from it some putative metaphorical deviance. The adjunct will go into that fallacy of long standing, but the problem is mentioned here to demonstrate once again how greater methodological consistency of treating obverse meaning before jumping into a supposedly reverse metaphor would have benefited the tradition.

One may certainly describe syntactic interanimation as a type of “focalization,” as did Ricoeur (1977, p. 132, leaning heavily on Black and Ullmann here). Again, this characteristic is not reserved for some “metaphorical” trait but occurs with every generation of meaning by meanings. As long as “statement” is equated with the signitive act, Ricoeur’s phrasing applies to (any!) sentence formation: “To the focalization of the statement by the word corresponds the contextualization of the word by the statement.” A good example of such a focalized interdependence, which also causes me to reinvoke the “tree” Icon, is offered by Hirsch (1967, pp. 58 60, 91-92, 220). Real trees, observes Hirsch, have roots connected to them permanently, but the meaning “tree” harbors the connotation “root” only when relevant to a particular use of “tree.” Expressing the wish to climb (“up”) a tree, for instance, would leave “root” suppressed as irrelevant implication for that statement.

Hirsch (pp. 81-87) makes this point to endorse his idea of a holistic “intrinsic genre.” But, as happens so often, the principle is not followed through systematically to its ultimate conclusion, at least not when Hirsch lauds Sandmann for having made the “sagest” comment by claiming that just because some languages did not possess a certain meaning does not prove that they lacked a parallel “thing-meant” (pp. 28-29). Hirsch seizes on such designations as “ice” and “mist,” among others, while asserting that the words “merely represent different states of the same thing. . . .” Obviously, Hirsch does not trace a “thing-meant” or “state” to their indigenous provenance, in his case the intrinsic genre. Alone the “ice” could spawn enough synchronic contingencies to spin off a series equal to the concoctions of the Peanuts cartoon. A few “l’s”--instead of the “Y’s” in that cartoon-could start forming Sinsigns with “ice” or “eyes,” going on from there. Locked into English, these states are inimitable because they evolved from one language to serve correlate selection in that language. No paraphasable “thing-meant” equals their unique foundation.

Hirsch’s other meteorological example, the “mist,” proves the same point: in my bilingual competence, I know that English “mist”--in Index close to the Icon “fog”-translates into German “Nebel,” which still resides partially in the English adjective “nebulous.” Yet the German Icon “Mist” carries as its Index a totally different scatological Index, a “thing-meant” of “dung” and “manure.” Every intersecting and diverging Icon or Index equals a language-bound “thing meant,” to what extent will become apparent later with this very meteorological example.

At the same time, my emphasis on signitive acts should not be construed either in terms of a linguistic pragmatism or behaviorism. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1963, p. 20), for instance, is a work that exhibits a strictly pragmatic orientation: it defines the “meaning of a word” as “its use in the language” but still fails to draw use into the dynamic essence of the meanings themselves. The behaviorist stance of Morris misses the mark on the same grounds. In his “Pragmatical Dimensions of Semiosis,” Morris (1938, pp. 32-33) defines “linguistic structure” as “a system of behavior” which makes signs come “true” when the behavior anticipated with the use then becomes “released.” Such a release, in effect, speech act theoreticians would meet with a “perlocutionary act.” According to their progenitor, Austin (1975, pp. 109 ff.), speakers “first” perform locutionary and then illocutionary acts that impose on locution “informing, ordering, warning . . .”Perlocutionary acts then take over and “bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading . . .” (his italics).

Diffracting linguistic activity into multiple acts would obstruct the harmony between function and essence. The same is true of the way in which Austin (ibid., pp. 92-93) divides acts into “phonetic acts” confined to “uttering . . . certain noises,” “phatic acts” that conform to rules of grammar and intonation, and “rhetic acts.” The latter must be capable of bestowing upon the other acts a “more or less definite ‘sense’ and a more or less definite ‘reference.’” What is “more or less” here? The separate quotes in themselves shroud the genuine confidence of the author in doubt. “Noises” may only be gleaned by themselves at their degenerate level, as they were with the bruitistic elements in the cartoons, bereft of meaning. Nor can the parallels of syntax and semantics, the phatic and rhetic acts, be severed from one another with Ingarden’s type of correlate, whose two essential acts remain the act of meaning and its signifying meanings.

Unfortunately, subsequent speech-act theoreticians, who added their own Essays on Austin (1973)--among them Searle, Forguson and Strawson--eradicated none of these problems but traded on the same basic ideas of speech acts which may be summarized as follows:

Searle, one of the foremost American proponents of speech-act theory, was quoted before on some misconceived notions involving intrinsic “rules” in language that turned out to be diachronic. In addition, he leans on extrinsic “devices” (1970, pp. 39-40), such as behavioral acts of promising. Certainly, these are identical in English or French, just because they are behavioristic criteria and thus not “in” either language any more than Hirsch’s states above. A truly linguistic “device” does not bear separation from its designation. The very fact that English shares its Icon “promise” with both a noun and verb, which is not the case in French, would disrupt the organic identity by causing syntactic-semantic values to diverge.

The same applies to precepts of “communicative competence” a German follower of Searle, Habermas, has set forth to improve on linguistic competence. In the lengthy essay (1971, pp. 101-141), Habermas departs from speech-act precepts of “issuance” (Äusserung, pp. 101-103, ff). He draws up a series of pragmatic categories whose cognates stay close to English: “Kommunikativa, Konstativa, Repräsentativa” and “Regulativa” (pp. 111-14). The first class depends on such performatives as “say, speak, tell,” the second on “assert” or “claim,” the third on “know” or “mean,” while the regulativa seem to cover illocutionary and perlocutionary acts entailed in command, challenge, and so on. Added to these classes are tenuous ontologogical dichotomies of long standing in German thought, such as “Sein” opposed to “Schein” and “Wesen” opposed to “Erscheinung”; they designate “reality” versus “reflection” and “essence” versus “appearance.”

These categories, accompanied by their dubious ontological distinctions, are too behavioral and descriptive to aid classifying any vital activity occurring in language and the intrinsic competence on which it relies. The “Konstativa” actually go back to the “constatives” of Austin (1975, pp. 67, 88, 109 110, 141). Their task was to pinpoint true and false conditions; they contrasted with the performatives confined to so-called (happy or unhappy) states of felicity, while these in turn differed from the “verdictives” serving a legal context. My divisions are not complete but stay too descriptive anyway: structure subordinates them, since fictive persons in any novel can utilize apparent constatives or equivalent acts. When they do, “truth” remains confined to Legisign existence of the contents involved and to the proof that a given stucture obtains. Matters are not helped either when Furberg (1971, p. 154), in some polemics over the truth factor of constatives between Austin and Strawson, contends that “Facts are what statements, when true, state.” The point is, what are “true” statements to these theoreticians?

To non-Aristotelian semantics, the correlate of a natural language is, in the meaning of Nietzsche, extramorally a “lie” because its very nature remains metaphysical and thus “beyond” nature in the manner described earlier. Ontic heteronomy, in its own circle, never directly “pictures” states of affairs, as claimed in the early Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1961, pp. 36-42). To borrow from Tarski (1944, pp. 343), truth as an “agreement with (correspondence to) reality” in terms of an “existing state of affairs” is possible only when the correlate enters one particular structure, Argument, to acquire truth claims in the function of linguistic verification. Once the correlate has been forged, the Tarskian type of truth may be realized only when the correlate goes “up” the strand bearing this structure in the open trichotomy at I.

With Argument, the empirical (autonomous-objective) reality enters language because the pure referent embedded in the correlate becomes juxtaposed with an objective referent (German “Sachverhalt”). The contact-previously made concrete with the overlap between language and the extra-linguistic reality-then comes into its own in a reality nexus. With that acquisition, language harbors truth claims at the level of the syntactic unit(y) and becomes functionally “literal” or “univocal,” no matter what the lexicon registers. The contact involved also serves redundance in idiomaticity, to be exemplified shortly. For Argument, as here understood, is the structure where all speakers begin to acquire their language in ostensive application as they wield their mother tongue in an empirical setting, from the first bisyllabic gurgles, holophrastic exclamations, and mnemonic nursery rhymes to sophisticated, theoretical pronouncements. Though post factum to the formation of the correlate, adequation leaves behind no sensation of a time lapse between encoding a pure referent and juxtaposing this with an objective counterpart. Native speakers are too adept at their craft and the tool, here English, they have wielded since childhood to pause between these functions.

Once the correlate yields the pure referent in the amalgamated direction-factor, it is projected “out into”--Ingarden’s “Hinausversetzung” (1965, pp. 164-172,)--the extralinguistic reality. With this projection, the correlate becomes an “assertion-sentence” (Behauptungssatz) or “judgment” (Urteil). In that projection, then, the pure-intentional fabric of the correlate is pierced, as it were, in order to meet an objective counterpart in signation as the ultimate content that is “meant.” Ingarden uses for adequation “Anpassung” or “Anpassen” (as gerund rather than noun), and occasionally also “Deckung” (pp. 171 175, 177, 179, passim; also Gumpel, 1974, pp. 12 16). Moreover, what the overlap of my diagrams affirmed additionally was the retention of both referents, the pure and objective one. Thus Ingarden (p. 175) states firmly in (my translation):

So even with true judgments, the persistence (Bestehen) of the two contents (Sachverhalte)-pure-intentional and objective-is undeniable.

How important that dual existence of contents or referents is, this study should prove conclusively after all the structures have had their due. The point is, the two referents may become aligned but in their distinctive ontological makeup cannot merge. At the same time, the shift in orientation through the adequating process also causes perforation of the pure-semantic texture. That effect Ingarden terms a “transparency” (pp. 172, 351; 1976, pp. 60-61) mostly with the adjective “durchsichtig,” to imply that the pure referent is left threadbare (see also his essay, “Poetics and Linguistics,” 1961, p. 7). But this effect results from the immediate impact at context. Content, on the other hand, gains in amplification in the long run, as the earlier diagram illustrated.

Enough has been divulged about Argument at this point to compare it with Peirce’s concept: under his “Ten Classes of Signs” (1960, p. 146-150, par. 2.254-2.264) Argument is the tenth, accompanied by the “Symbolic Legisign.” Argument linked to the “Symbolic” affirms that “its object must be a general” (p. 149, par. 2.63); Argument as Legisign means that it must be a “Sign of law . . . an ulterior sign through a law” (pp. 144, 149, par. 2.252, 2.263). In some contexts Peirce aligns Argument in function to the judgment and proposition, alluding in addition to “an actual existent” that “tends to the truth” (pp. 144-145, 149, par. 2.252, 2.263). “Ulterior” indeed is the adequating process when taking over from a finished correlate to make a sentence tend toward truth through an objective referent that signifies an actual existent. The fact that adequation must accompany Argument certainly amounts to a “law” for this structure. What has to be modified, however, is Peirce’s idea of Argument as highest (tenth) generate class, since the open state of the noetic trichotomy keeps generation equal if separate. This change is to be expected when one remembers Peirce’s (purely) logical orientation. Earlier, I was forced to abandon Cassirer’s symbolic-semiotic synthesis because this ended with logical judgment. Ingarden’s extended treatment of literary use restored balance to that one sided focus.

The example Ingarden himself supplies (pp. 164-170) for his “assertion-sentence” or “judgment” will help illustrate my comments. That his choice falls on such an ordinary sentence as “My pen lies on the desk”--“Meine Füllfeder liegt auf dem Schreibtisch”--makes evident that his idea of “judgment” is linguistic rather than purely logical here. The sentence could be as much part of a real letter as a novel, which presents the very challenge non-Aristotelian semantics must meet in avoiding a lexical explanation. In an amusing way, one can almost visualize Ingarden sitting at his desk and staring at the pen before him. Beyond such facetious conjectures, however, there remains the scientific fact that, for this to be a linguistic judgment, Ingarden would have to be a real, nonfictive speaker. The correlate then acquires a reality-nexus and bears a truth claim-which does not mean that the statement has to be true. As Ingarden notes (1965, p. 176), the truth claim also can be fulfilled “negatively.” Put paradoxically, an apparently “false” statement remains functionally “true” insofar as adequation has occurred, which is a rather different finding from Furberg’s simplistic notion of “true” statements. Ingarden’s premisee will be of great importance to all the deviance cults in terms of ontological category-mistakes that arise with the traditional view of metaphor.

In detailing Ingarden’s model, it is best to adopt a Cartesian stance of taking nothing for granted. The opening “My” is derived from the extant “my” vocable and thus enjoys “true” Legisign status. Through that existence, Iconic indentations may form their Index within the signitive convolutions speakers of English share intersubjectively as partners. The “My” is in capitalized Qualisign form to signal onset of the correlate. Fused to this correlate, the centrifugal Icon denotes possession in the first person. Through the centripetal Index, possession connotes whatever becomes relevant to the constitution. The “My” suggests personal ownership of a pen and is heightened perhaps by the illocutionary force of pride.

This tentative construal necessitates completion of the entire correlate. The fact that this “My” belongs to an adequated correlate takes priority in converting it into a “true” designation by virtue of the structure, Argument. With a reality-nexus attached, the “My” may designate the abstract (autonomous-ideal) idea of ownership and a concrete (autonomous-real) phenomenon of possession, as when the pen in the situational context has the speaker’s name engraved on it, perhaps. The primary truth for this heteronomous entity consists of its extant Legisign existence and the secondary type necessitates adequating with existents of ontic autonomy, be these corporeal or (abstract) ideal. Accordingly, this “My” becomes functionally “literal” and/or univocal, along with all the other constituents, operative and eidetic in contribution.

Of course, the neo-Aristotelian tradition has many confused notions of the “literal” qualifier besides basing it on a nondeviant lexicon. For instance, a “literal” univocality is obtained through skimming the Icons, an artificial practice to non-Aristotelian semantics because Icons should not be detached from their Indexes. When done, the German explicit content, the “Füllfeder” above for the “fountain pen,” delivers an English “*fill-feather,” and the “Schreibtisch” a “writing table.” While the latter compound is still permissible instead of my brief “desk,” the former has to remain starred for English despite the separate existence of the compound’s segments. Thus “*fill-feather” as synchronic state is no Legisign and prevents an Icon from indenting further as one Index where this language is concerned. However, what the Icons yield when skimmed at the diachronic level is the viable contact language once made with the extralinguistic reality through adequation. The German “filling” and “the feather,” as well as the English “fountain,” all bear traces of their respective situational contexts, from the quill pen to the cylindrical applicator filled with ink that often caused this liquid to squirt, which speakers of English then viewed as a “fountain.”

These transparencies mirror stages of linguistic historicity and as such date the expression, as reflected in the Icons. And of late there is also that device with the round nib English Iconizes as “ballpoint pen.” Contents, when properly understood, thus bear an “extrinsic” relation to the empirical world no matter how distinctly “intrinsic” their (non-adequated) essence. Therefore, Ingarden’s theory of ontic heteronomy should not offend anyone, not even die hard Marxists, since it guarantees such contacts.

To play the devil’s advocate a moment longer, in the traditional purview the same “literal” surface could join ranks with the “metaphorical” prepositions: a fountain gushing ink? Who ever heard of that beyond an odd English designation? Apparently the Germans stayed more sober by adhering to the filling action. So there is a nice “metaphorical” transference from cascading water to squirting ink. To non-Aristotelian semantics this compound simply demonstrates how Ought-Values have flattened into Is-Values; language and not logic has eradicated the sensation of metaphor, leaving the surface no less “strange” if one wants to make a bid for the lexicon. While knowledge at the diachronic level remains encyclopedic--fit for an etymologist, philologist, and equivalent professional-all native speakers trade on synchronic states that let their meaning (I) emerge through Icons (M) with their relevant Indexes (0). The “*fill-feather” stays “dead” to English by not being able to rise to such heights of generation while the “fountain pen” quite literally has the word.

A translator, of course, has a problem grappling with these distinct Icons and Indexes. My translation proves it: I reduced the “fountain pen” to plain “pen” in reasoning that, no matter which kind, only one major tool existed at the time of Ingarden’s writing. For this type of heuristic illustration such a strong reliance on the inference may be permissible but not in a literary, non-adequated text where Icons are everything because no reality-nexus exists. Caution must be exercised in the area of inference lest the translator slip into a pseudo-Referent. At the level of synchronic states, though, another unique contiguity arises, since the English “pen” bears a potential Index of “animal enclosure.” Also, the “ball” in the modern “ballpoint” pen has been validated as part of its compound--but not that juvenile “ball” for “moon” the critics (Ingendahl, Landmann) mistakenly wanted to foist on a linguistic “metaphor.” Whether or not a moon is rounder than a nib is not at issue; language does not ask but ordains in that “coercive” manner my study first discussed. Thus German carries the related Icon “Ball” for the toy and dance, but has opted for a “Kugelschreiber,” something compounded into a “disk” that “writes,” as the Iconic equivalent to the “ballpoint pen,” and speakers may either take it or leave it since private alteration is strictly ruled out.

Even a setting may be adventitious enough to relativize the traditional view of “literal” versus “metaphorical.” Such a problem surfaces in what I shall call the metalinguistic gesture. Metalinguistic is the mode of describing what is being done while speaking, and gestural the histrionic pointing in the metalinguistic reinforcement. The “literal” gesture motions to Icons, as when a speaker drops a fountain pen into a real fountain and says that, “literally,” this is now a “fountain pen.” The other gesture has the same speaker draw out the Index when, while filling the pen, the person says that with the squirting ink a “fountain” is meant only “metaphorically” insofar as no water cascades from a genuine fountain. As pure gestures, neither type can affect the structure. But non-Aristotelian semantics at least identifies all possible nuances of what tradition throws around as “literal” and “metaphorical.” None of these conditions effect correlate formation at the level of the pure referent or adequation at the objective referent. Still, until all the possibilities are probed and examined, such a conclusion cannot be reached. Neo-Aristotelian semantics has never reached them by not taking the pains to sort out the nature of meaning. Basically, all the above instances of “literal” or “metaphorical” dissolve into meaning, unless the attempt is to describe a style and/or a metalinguistic surface. Exactly what makes language functionally literal, the following diagram should demonstrate conclusively.

ADEQUATION IN PROGRESS

1) CORRELATE = PURE-SEMANTIC REFERENT

2) REALITY-NEXUS = OBJECTIVE REFERENT

Again, I try to draw for the sake of clarity what eludes all concrete manifestation. Though crude, my diagram nevertheless depicts the two levels of contents that arise with the adequating process and have been presented so far in the overlap between two circles. The numbers are supposed to stress the order of priority: formation of the correlate, (1), precedes juxtaposition with an objective referent, (2). The sentence must form before it can conform to any fact; only linguistic competence shapes the former, while encyclopedic knowledge enters language with the latter. When in progress, adequation is not sensed as a dual task. Only the keen introspection of a theoretician of language would lead to such cognizance.

The correlate displays capitalization at one end and punctuation at the other to demarkate its bounds. The nominal portion “My pen” comprises a possessive and a noun-subject, while the predicate with its intransitive verb “lies” encompasses the prepositional unit “on the desk.” Now, the verb bears the recursive direction-factor that counters the overt sequence by seeking out the noun and interlocking with it, in the manner explained, whereupon nominal-verbal unfolding goes into effect at M and interlocking at 0. At that point a signitive act has induced closure (I), with signitive contiguities forged in the process. The constituents interact by “correlating” with one another and double-intentionality prevails in thetic I-M-0 generation as an act of meaning (I) becomes corporealized and embodies explicit and implicit meanings (M-O).

Through adequation, the correlate is then projected “out” into the extralinguistic reality: on the diagram, the amalgamated direction factor is shown going downard to meet this objective referent. At that point, the graphic objects become aligned with the contents. With no other graphic means available, the white interspaces between the words may depict the perforation caused by adequation, even if language always looks that way when printed. So, when the (autonomous-)real entities become signified in the juxtaposition, the shift in focus moves away from the meanings themselves to the things “below” that are now “meant.” If the adequated use is ostensive, the presentational immediacy is such that the “My”-speaker assumes a face and perhaps confronts a hearer directly. These interlocutory partners then actually hold the reality-nexus between them. Ingarden terms such an ostensive setting a “concrete instance” (konkreter Fall; 1965, p. 65). Not only the speakers but their environment becomes rounded off in corporeal dimensions, lending constitutive support to the schematic material contents, as would apply here to the color and contour of “pen” and “desk.” In the process, a type of disambiguation (Gumpel, 1974, pp. 180-185) occurs that reduces Icons to sheer labels for . . ., causing maximal semantic depletion in the narrowed-down schema through the obtrusion of an objective referent. This is how primeval language must have begun. Today, Icons no longer depend on such ostensive support but flourish in their dynamic significance.

When written, an adequated work--like mine--undergoes depletion with every unfolding correlate, ironically, as context progresses and seemingly becomes augmented. Thus all my sentences here go into adequation, one by one, since I am a real author in aim of truth claims. As my study progresses, it receives ever-greater backing from the objective referent of the conditions about language I intend to reveal. But I could not get to that point without the linguistic competence which first shapes the pure referent, the correlate. However, no matter how figurative the style, my language stays functionally literal. The language I use becomes instrumentalized to verify language use.

Another example might be a manual for the use of pens: no one is going to concentrate on alliteration and other such stylistic niceties; reading a manual on pens is strictly informational, not esthetic. The instruction matters more than carefully structured sentences. Indeed, so crucial is the information itself that the correlate may be violated through paraphrasing. A sentence differently exteriorized becomes a “parallel phrase” and thus another pure referent or correlate before adequation. The correlates must differ in their nominal-verbal unfolding and interlocking. But both correlates may converge on the objective referent at the second level, much as their pure referents differ. The semantic telos then becomes replaced by a pragmatic goal.

A related issue arises with the verb “lie,” which has some rather interesting “Aristotelian” repercussions. In the first place, my choice of words was guided somewhat by the translation because the German verb for designating the position of objects usually has them “lie” when flat and “stand” when vertical. However, in the context of the correlate and its subsequent contact with the reality-nexus depicted, the choice of “is” may have said as much about the tool’s presence. To be sure, this modification affects the correlate at nominal-verbal unfolding and interlocking. Nothing can alter that fact. But from the standpoint of the objective referent, perhaps, either word may have done as well by this “pen” and its position.

The “Aristotelian” aspect is that this ancient propounder of metaphor trades on a similar example involving a predicate. In anticipation of his exposition, then, the argument would be as follows: the fact that the pen actually “is” on the desk converts “lies” into an usurping, deviant content which, as proxy stand-in, has taken over. Since “lies” denotes a more specific action than mere being, the transference would be to Aristotle of a species-to-genus order. Non Aristotelian semantics, of course, cannot accept such a localized function. The principle is not indigenous to shaping the correlate but comes closer to rupturing it, since that other predicate is not there as Icon and could at best be engendered through the given Icon as relevant Index. So the pen that “lies” on the table also implies that it “is” on the table. But to impose the concrete position on the wording in essence would force the arrow to go from (2) back “up” to (1), a most unnatural situation.

For this English version, the inventory governing the content and the context may certainly work together. If the “My-” owner were a less than scrupulous person, for instance, the double entendre might arise that the pen which “lies” on the desk also “lies” in words. This phrasing makes the pen sound animated, but no more so than when one says in English that a given pen “writes well,” as though this thing possessed voluntary movement. Adequation may well provide the missing link, quite concretely the hand of the person trying out the pen. Whatever the case, irrespective of all these embellishments, the language remains “literal” as long as the reality-nexus obtains.

The diagram for adequation brings me also to the promised Fregean sequel. The juxtaposed objective referent is loosely what Frege meant by “reference”--down to the “rigid” designators Fregean followers such as Kripke were seen to relegate to vague “worlds.” Well, the “world” is herewith identified; it belongs to the reality-nexus at the second level. The first level corresponds roughly to Frege’s idea of “sense” which, unfortunately, he couched in nothing but affective designations of sensuous appeal. So Frege’s planet Venus would be located at the second level where the graphic pen is. But the meanings “Venus” or the other linguistic versions, the “evening” and “morning star,” reside at the level of the pure referent, as parts of some correlate. As explained, these meanings may converge on the reality nexus, but as teleologically bound syntactic constituents they remain distinct. Unless included in the same sentence, they have no contact, outside of that vast internalized oppositional network speakers share.

Frege may have been right when he suggested that literary use traded on “sense” only, hence the correlate at (1). But Frege was guilty of failing to explicate sense and suggesting tacitly that reference had stopped when, actually, that is where reference begins. Were it otherwise, adequation would not have to depend on those curious “linguistic doppelganger,” to borrow a figure from Furberg (1971, p. 136). Ingarden (1965, p. 174) makes a point of stressing that the pure-intentional one stays inimitable; ontic heteronomy and ontic autonomy never coincide. The “My” possessive proves his point as well as the demonstratives he uses for the illustration. Where is this “My” at the lower level of the diagram? There is nothing to see, although, as suggested, the pen could be engraved with the speaker’s name to weight the possessive. Whatever the case, meanings are not semantic marbles; neither their concrete nor abstract states identify with those of ontic autonomy, as reiterated throughout this study.

Not that adequation does not make enormous contributions to the amplification of a linguistic inventory at that long range level explained. The best illustration of that input is idiom formation. Idioms project their own type of an extended, or syntagmatic, dead metaphor, at least for the tradition and not my own theory. That is, overtly idioms are frozen Icons, mostly at the predicate end of the correlate while nominal heads are kept floating. A whole predicate, therefore, goes into one indentation as though it were a single word. Thus several Icons share one Indexical groove as one internalized word. Obviously, idioms are the products of semantic redundance through adequation, in a long processing of literalization. But appearances delude: literalization is long-range whereas an immediate contextualization could force these seemingly redundant vestiges into one of the literary strands, where they turn up in novels or poems and become revivified by that change in structure no matter how transparent their lingo.

Idioms would certainly qualify as some of those “everyday metaphors” the earlier-cited critics envisaged with prepositions. In the loose traditional nomenclature, most idioms come off as literal-metaphorical hybrids. From an aspect of sheer semantic redundance, the literalized idioms are “old” (Gumpel, 1974, pp. 36 ff.). But their abrupt introduction into a context and possible literary resuscitation lets them appear “new” as well. Their curious potential for sudden inclusion as well as their outer color and rigidity make for a unique combination of characteristics. The colorful nuances are obvious in “seeing the light” and “falling off the wagon,” for instance. So is the need to cling to the definite article. What the definite points to here is a stabilized projection of the direction-factor in its set Index rather than to some nominal antecedent. That is why “the” light or wagon may be introduced without any prior reference to those nouns; that is why their article embodies a transformational defect. When changed to indefinite “a” light or wagon, the individual correlating Icons return and no longer cohere to convey together a sudden realization or a state of sobriety.

As for vibrant color, there could hardly be a more ironic example than the colorless fish English reserves for a “phony issue,” the “red herring” (Gumpel, ibid., pp. 24-25). That is to say, the Icon in the color “red” and the entire “fishy” expression are colorful enough for an Index of a seemingly abstract connotation. Still, that fish is also colorless because there is no such objective referent by that color in empirical reality. Some interesting conjectures on that diachronic inception by U. Weinreich (1969, p. 42) have been entertained. But far more fascinating is the power of language to force through its “lying” contents nevertheless and keep them extant. Strictly speaking, of course, this “red herring” possesses truth as Legisign and attains additional truth claims if it lands in the structure of Argument. Once the adequation through some situational context forged this idiom. Now it may enter any of the structures.

Related to the idiom is the proverb, where an entire sentence and not just a frozen predicate coheres in one basic import. For that reason, proverbs are colorful like idioms, but also terse enough to facilitate fast oral transmission and retention. A good case in point is “Misery loves company,” and this is offered by Chomsky (1965, pp. 149 ff.) to illustrate violation of “selectional” rather than “subcategorization” rules. The latter kind break syntactic norms, such as the transitive rule in “John compelled,” whereas selection supposedly counters semantic norms. The other difference is that selectional violation keeps sentences construable, indeed, it accounts for the presence of metaphor and personification, contends Chomsky (ibid.). Both rules are questionable, since they will turn out not to affect the other two structures.

But to dwell briefly on this proverb: as with the idioms, the proverb draws on semantic redundance and thus could have registered practically anything in semantic selection on the surface. The objective referent, consonant with a situation which pertains to the comfort of sharing grief, has come to obtrude on these Icons through repeated adequation, almost as though that arrow on the diagram could indeed reverse and go from the second level back to the first, where the pure referent resides. Next, the selection itself, which has stayed a big issue in linguistic explorations of metaphor, is a tenuous principle nevertheless. Actually, Chomsky is the one who, in questioning selection, violates the natural selection of language. His own native competence should have told him that the English oppositional system has aligned the social and human aspects in the additional “business” Index of “company.” Language selects as it sees fit. The same applies to the verb Icon “love”; it does not always render emotional involvement but also serves as an intensifier of “like.”

Plainly, in the dynamics of semantic material contents, where collective nouns thwart number by conveying plurality in the singular, the initiating “Misery”--obviously standing for humans--is no special case either. So, if anything, all selections here cling to the English lingo if not to Chomsky’s logic. The nouns, “misery” and “company,” each reflect instead the “metonymic” type of singular which renders the many through the one and preserves the priority of terseness. No wonder Chomsky (1965, p. 163) misses the “boundaries of syntax and semantics,” as the chapter bearing these rules is called, conceding that he is forced to “conclude a highly inconclusive discussion.”

Idioms and proverbs may be submitted to yet another and more constructive dichotomy than Chomsky’s, one that became known as “foregrounding” and “backgrounding” (Plett, 1975, pp. 127 ff.). The terms as such may be traced to the Czech Structuralists, specifically to a collaborative volume entitled A Prague Reader on Esthetics (1964, pp. viii-ix, 9), where the editor, Garvin, offered these translations for Czech “actualisace” and “automatization.” Idioms or proverbs are automatized expressions, backgrounded in a rigidified import, if often foregrounded in the (“metaphorical”) color noted. So “background” equals the stabilized direction-factor in the objective referent whose power is such that the arrow on my diagram seems to go the opposite way, from the second-back up-to the first level. Correlation for the constituents is kept at a minimum. Originally perforated in the frequent adequation, such contents have become annealed. The individual choice cannot be broken down further since multiple Icons possess one indented groove as though they were one word that the authorial will (I) selects in content (M) to obtain the Index (0).

Under those circumstances, the backgrounded import may have to determine the foregrounded Icons. Any of the above examples display that: the “phony issue” guides the “red herring” which otherwise possesses no reference to anything. However, the Czech Structuralists--Havranek and Mukarovsky (ibid.)--make their point with greetings and the social etiquette accompanying them. To use my own example, German “Guten Tag!” yields a foregrounded “Good day!” Yet in English backgrounding the greeting connotes, not a polite salutation as it does in German, but rather a tart equivalent of “Scram!” on the order of the “Out!” cited before to show that prepositions could generate commands. In a more homespun German equivalent of a salutation, “Grüss Gott!” when foregrounded yields, not a provincial greeter but someone resembling a religious fanatic who insists on the need to “Greet God!” everywhere. The backgrounding, however, resembles a colloquial English “Hi!” Even “God” has featured in my study, beginning with its English Sinsign reversal from “dog.” “God” in this case, is part of what Austin (1975, pp. 81, 83, 88, 150-162) has called a “behabitive” by triggering a certain behavior. In that capacity, a greeting lapses fast into a stereotyped utterance: to Jakobson (1956, pp. 59-60) it is a shrunken “phrase-word,” of which the monotonous “How do you do?” may be one of the best examples. (See also Gumpel, 1974, pp. 20-25).

The primary purpose of these behabitive idioms is to signal social etiquette through their automatized backgrounding which then determines the foregrounding in another language. However, even when that is done, the foregrounding cannot be adapted slavishly. A case in point is the dubbed Western for German television: to hear a sturdy American cowboy utter his colloquial equivalent to English “Hi!” as “Grüss Gott!” may not be disconcerting to the German audience but amuses the bilingual speaker. Despite the seemingly correct choice of Icons, these are too ethnic in flavoring to cross the Atlantic as natural vernacular and eradicate the German muzzle.

These examples all seem to stress behaviorism, but that muzzle serves as an important reminder that idioms are Legisigns with the literary potential elucidated and thus a capacity equal in signation to any constituent. Also, what these greetings reveal, the single Iconic Legisigns affirm within latent opposition. Only translators who tread on foreign (Qualisign) ground may have to sever Indexical background from Iconic foreground. That problem is shown below with examples from Ingarden’s “pen” sentence for adequation. The English “pen” is backgrounded as animal enclosure and writing tool, while the German “Feder” becomes backgrounded into a bird feather and writing tool. How the Icons in the last two versions draw a blank with the wrong Index is clearly shown, though unfortunately not demonstrable without mixing the languages.

E = ENGLISH, G = GERMAN
enc = enclosure. wrt.=Wrong tool, tld=bud reatner
() = parentnesis added Import (Index)
--- = blank

Ontologically part of the second trichotomy, the “M” equates with the foregrounded Icon and the “0” with the backgrounded Index. Figure (1) manifests how two backgrounded Indexes, the enclosure and the writing tool, foreground into “pen.” Figure (2) similarly has the backgrounded bird ruffles and tool foreground into the German “feather” (Feder). Yet in Figures (3) and (4), the foregrounded enclosure into German “Stall” and the foregrounded bird ruffles into “feather” no longer yield the German “pen” as “Feder” nor the English “pen” as “feather.” With the context sensitive Index obliterated in the blank areas of the last two figures, no meaning can result from an act of meaning at I, picking up the wrong Icons. In my analysis of indentations and hyletic doubling, the Icons were separated with their respective Indexes, as would apply to “pen” in (1), for instance, when given twice for each Index. But with the one Index in parenthesis anyway, a single Icon suffices for this heuristic illustration. The two Indexes, incidentally, were listed partially in diachronic consideration. In the second figure, for instance, the bird feather had to precede the quill pen as artifact.

Speakers cannot elude these differences in oppositional values. However, that there is such a thing as occasional speaker rebellion, a mass media controversy demonstrates as diverting proof. Certain letters addressed to Ann Landers followed one another closely in the Minneapolis Tribune (April 5, July 31, August 13, November 9, all in 1979, pp. 4B, 3B, 2C, respectively) to show by that frequency how much the subject preoccupies speakers, specifically writers. These blamed Landers for her past willingness to accept the senseless question in the greeting “How are you?” where any attempt at an answer unleashes a superfluous “rundown” of ingrown toenails and the like. Landers readers thus offer a “warmer” alternative with “Howdy!” while Landers herself reneges on hopes of future “Howdying” due to the foregrounded provincialism, fit for a “bowlegged cowboy.” After explaining that “Howdy!” came from the equally senseless greeting “How do you do?” and thus the meaningless question “How do I do what?”, Landers pointedly thanks one communicating “Pardner.”

Other entries challenge the sexist salutation of “Dear Sir” for letters as also that “gesundheiting” behabitive triggered with every sneeze as a more or less polite reaction (actually transported into English from the German). These disturbed “pardners” do not realize they are up against a coercive power so strong that, curiously, although they helped to make it they cannot break it without severing that intersubjective bond of interlocutory partnership. In some respects, “God” Himself could not be more omniscient-had indeed not eluded the English whim of trading on the other side of “dog,” or finding His name taken in vain by provincial Teutonic greeters.

Dicent and Rheme as Constructs: Quasi-Judgment versus Metaphor

The other two structures, the literary genres Dicent and Rheme, will be discussed together, but they require two chapters. One chapter deals with the constructs as encoded by a Referent and the other with their decoding in concretization by a Recipient. In concretization the constructs become “reconstructed” by passing through the consciousness of a Recipient. So the literary genres are first treated as holistic composites and then tested in their construal. The reciprocity between Referent and Recipient roles may complicate separating the topics on occasion, but the subsequent textual analyses combine the topics anyway by proving how the constructs reveal their structure when concretized in selected texts.

In non-Aristotelian semantics, content must be probed functionally in its specific contextualization. Critics should be alerted to Legisign neutrality: surely they see that modern literary texts may exhibit any of the idioms, behabitive greetings, or proverbs that came up in illustration under Argument, from a “red herring” to a “How do you do?” or a proverb on the order of Chomsky’s “Misery” example. Any “Howdying” among fictive communicating “pardners” will differ in essence from the Landers correspondents. Even the metalinguistic gestures discussed before are not to be excluded, be they “literal” or “metaphorical.” A fictive dinner guest, too, may motion to Icons and say, “Literally, this is a red herring,” in reference to some such fish dipped in a red sauce (or a red light?) while the conversation revolves around a phony issue; another may motion to the Indexes and affirm that the phrase was meant “metaphorically” since neither the stated color nor species of fish is really being signified.

If not confined to a structure, these seeming everyday vestiges are to non-Aristotelian semantics neither truly literal nor metaphorical: Argument brands them literal and the Rheme, it will turn out, metaphorical. Once contents have entered the strands of Dicent and Rheme, they must remain non-adequated. Adequation is thus the pivot for literary use, negatively or positively. The negative prefix “non-” in itself underscores that no juxtaposition with an objective referent occurs. The lack of adequation leaves the pure referent, which is always primary anyway to this juxtaposition, to its own devices. A non-adequated correlate thus consists of natural units wholly indigenous to the pristine essence of linguistic meaning.

The diagram of texts showed nevertheless that Argument and Dicent shared the size of the correlate, a syntactic unit(y) designated respectively “judgment” and “quasi-judgment,” so that the “quasi-” prefix implies lack of adequation. The same diagram demonstrated also how Dicent and Rheme had parallel arrows which went straight from the circle of language as ontic heteronomy into their respective texts--a graphic means, therefore, of depicting their non-adequated status. Where these two structures differ instead is in the size of their constitutional unit(y), since the Rhemic correlate has been extended from syntax to context, specifically poetic intext. And the “metaphor” identified with this intext supersedes lexical neutrality by belonging only to the Rheme. Still grounded in the meaning of Greek “metaphora,” this non-Aristotelian metaphor continues to underscore transference, if not as something pitted against, but coordinated with, reference and yet modified exclusively for an extended correlate.

Obviously, non-Aristotelian semantics does not give priority to “genres” that consist of the multiple formats dictated by sheer fashions of taste, hence the literary etiquette popular in different phases of history. Where necessary, the structure of such formats will be identified. In literary scholarship, with no ambitions of isolating semantic essence, a descriptive approach is also valid. Critics embarking on such ventures study the taxonomy of contents and the stylistic impact of the imagery borne by a work. But those data elude any functional contextualization of contents, a difference of approach that must be recognized if in no way disparaged.

However, any such awareness among critics at large remains doubtful. As late as 1966, Fowler, the editor of Essays on Style and Language (p. 10), complained in the introduction to his collaborative volume that, so far, no “formal feature, or set of features” had been found which could identify “literature” unequivocally and that he accordingly doubted their existence. Fowler’s significant problem is not realizing that his “features” are reduced to the lexicon. His perspective is equivalent to assuming that a cigarette stub in a collage will alter visibly just because it has become an esthetic component. Of course, changes occur in the esthetic setting of a composition, but the piece of refuse as such remains. At least, the materiality is conveniently visible on a collage, whereas linguistic Qualisigns may be perceived concretely and yet stay on a page with their language gone in total I-O-M degeneration, something that could not happen to visual art forms. At the higher degenerate levels, however, the identity of function and essence is even closer than in compositions of the visual arts. So despite lexical appearances, the substance of meanings changes considerably with the structure.

To date that message has not sunk in. Barely three years after Fowler, Baumgärtner’s (German) essay on the “methodological status of a linguistic poetics” offered an international survey of twentieth-century theories, up to the date of his essay. Baumgärtner (1969, p. 27) concludes by referring to Fowler’s pessimism. Nor does he himself (pp. 38-40) offer a solution, since he trades on the figurative lexical surface considered “formal” in Fowler’s sense. In typical spotsighting, Baumgärtner probes isolated contents by the means of that old standby my study has disclosed as so fundamental in syntactic-semantic interaction that it proves nothing at all--animation. Not without irony, Baumgärtner (p. 15) actually begins his survey by citing Jakobson on the “flagrant anachronism” committed by linguists who stay “deaf to the poetic function of language” or by literary scholars who remain “indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods. . . .”

Such a confident opening is shattered when Baumgärtner (p. 26) throws Jakobson’s equivalence on the discard pile with the other modern theories for failing to differentiate a “poetic” from a “standard” language. Even the timing of Jakobson’s pronouncement on which Baumgärtner trades has an ironic twist: it appeared as the “closing” part to Jakobsons own (1960, p. 377) “Closing Statement,” which covered linguistics and poetics along with his equivalence. Yet by the time of Baumgärtner’s essay, no “closing” argument had appeared in the way of a solid conclusion. Jakobson, the linguist who was certainly not “deaf’ to or unconversant with issues governing linguistic poetics, had thus failed too. His equivalence has been cited before in this study, where I covered the leaps of language and the intrinsic categories they forge to prove that, indeed, the principle is not a unique “poetic” phenomenon. Of late, Culler observed in his Stucturalist Poetics (1977, p. 75): “Semantics has not yet reached the stage where it can characterize the meaning of a text.” Culler claims that even the more modest attempts in that area of semantics fall short of expectations. His prognosis (p. 162), too, is pessimistic since any theory aiming to base poetry on “special (linguistic) properties” seems to him doomed to failure.

My analysis of Dicent and Rheme, in that order, does trade on a “structuralist poetics” which may remove some of these gloomy predictions. While it may sound like a tautology to state that a component of fiction is fictional irrespective of content, non-Aristotelian semantics will indicate how that difference is to be assessed. Etymologically rooted in (Latin) “telling,” Dicent, the first structure to be examined, is here the genre of fiction, which on a functional basis includes not only epic prose but the dramatic kind as well. And drama may be versified as shown with the Shakespearean excerpt from Romeo and Juliet. In my structural alignment, I followed the genre determination of Kate Hamburger (1968, pp. 15-52; trans. 1973, pp. 8-54). What a novel and a play share functionally is mimetic augmentation. No matter how such works differ, they commence at zero point and lay their foundation cumulatively by the means of concatenating non adequated correlates, the quasi judgments. Since these correlates are not singly perforated as in Argument, there is progressive amplification rather than regressive depletion; no obtruding reality-nexus grows at the expense of the pure referent. Instead, a simulated world emerges, invested with only those characteristics the unfolding correlates yield piecemeal at their Iconic-Indexical levels and cumulatively in their concatenation.

Before detailing non-Aristotelian Dicent further, I turn to Peirce’s ten classes of signs (1960, p. 150, par. 2.264). There, “Dicent” is given in attributive form with an Indexical Sinsign as well as Legisign and a “Symbol Legisign.” No matter what the obvious generative discrepancies among the three, they would not serve my purpose without modification, if for no other reason than that all become subordinated to the tenth class, Argument, as elucidated. The open format of the last trichotomy broke through such a hierarchy for the three structures. Nor is Dicent in attributive form helpful to non-Aristotelian semantics, where it is a structural determinant in full control. An exception, to be sure, is the categorical qualifier invoked while discussing the Picture of Language: all signs, beginning with the Qualisigns at the first trichotomy, become branded by the structure they enter as “Dicentic” or “Rhemic” components.

For an illustration of Peircean ideas, I go back to his former standby, the street cry. Peirce (p. 151, par. 2.265) first refers to a “Replica of a Dicent Indexical Sinsign” and then offers this example. The street cry presents an “Indexical Legisign” insofar as its tone and theme identify an individual and, as “Replica,” arise in a “Dicent Sinsign” for the “individual instance.” A street cry in non-Aristotelian Dicent lays the foundation of a fictional world through its Iconic Legisigns; “Indexical” is its deeper meaning, perhaps part of the theme and tone Peirce mentions. But so interwoven is this vestige with a purposive literary foundation that it cannot be a mere replica of anything but itself. In teleological constitution, this cry has become fused to its context. What may be salvaged from Peirce’s Dicent instead for the intrinsic foundation of language can be found in his assertion that its

intended Interpretant represents the Dicent Symbol as being, in respect to what it signifies, really affected by its Object, so that the existence or law which it calls to mind must be actually connected with the indicated Object (p. 149, par. 2.262).

Dicent, as postulated in my analysis, certainly becomes “affected by” and remains “connected to” its “Object” through a particular mode of “existence” that is the very “law” of operation. Indeed, through the task of Dicentic presenting that is shortly to be explained the object really is being “indicated.” In addition, an “Object” is also relevant to my placement of Dicent on the open trichotomy, where it occupied the “middle” or 0-locus between M-Rheme and I-Argument. Although this open format had eradicated any hierarchy of generation among the structures, the locus helps to characterize Dicent: it is neither mere expression nor container of an objective referent attached to a reality-nexus. Dicentic “objects” of people and places thus arise from language, ontic heteronomy; they may be termed emergents rather than existents insofar as they evolve solely from concatenating correlates.

My idea of Dicent would thus also oppose Bense’s (1971, p. 27), who said under “Interpretant-relations” that “dikentisch” identifies with the “assertoric” (behauptungsfähig) sentences which are either true or false, whereas “argumentisch” governs axiomatic-deductive conditions of apodictic truth. Dicent as non-adequated structure cannot aspire to any kind of truth beyond Legisign validation and structural self-identity. To posit otherwise would get no further than espousing the “constatives” and equivalents Habermas classified for his communicative competence: any novel or drama may harbor these activities as Icons if the plot revolves around a fictive theorist. But in that fictional setting persons and their apparent propositions stay caught in the web of non-adequated correlates.

The Dicentic micro-component, the quasi-judgment correlate, also affirms the middle 0-locus for its structure: like Argument it still partakes of syntax as “ judgment”; like the Rheme its “quasi-” prefix keeps it non-adequated. Accordingly, Dicentic idiosyncrasies still reflect those of the other two structures in a type of transition though belonging to neither one. Insofar as the Dicentic unit(y) is still syntactic, furthermore, it retains the basic correlate hierarchy elucidated with Argument, as this begins with the noun initiating “objectification of the meant.” The “ judgment” part has thus been covered in the preceding chapter; the “quasi-” prefix reassigns the literary contribution to this correlate as Dicentic particle. Of course, the essence differs quite drastically in accordance with this change and thus “quasi “ by no means suggests any half-hearted measure. Rather, Ingarden (1965, pp. 175-176) affirms that the quasi-judgment must be derived exclusively from a “pure expression-sentence” or “reiner Aussagesatz.”

The Dicentic correlate as quasi-judgment has its tasks cut out for it, central as it is to the four strata Ingarden posits for the literary work of art. The first two strata, covered by the fourth and fifth chapters in the Literary Work of Art (pp. 25, 30-61, 61-196), take care of semantic constitution in forming the sentence, much as was analyzed in this study under the hierarchy of syntax; the last two strata, treated in Ingarden’s succeeding sixth to ninth chapters (pp. 196-270, 270-307), engage in a function designated “Darstellung,” which may be translated as “representation” as well as “presentation,” and I choose the latter term. Language presents itself instead of being representational of other worlds while “indicating” its sphere, to draw on Peirce above. The Dicentic quasi-mirror seems to imitate an extralinguistic reality of persons in their various pursuits but actually reinforces indigenous presenting through the selected Icons and their relevant Indexes. What Icons “present” in an amalgamation attains “presence,” one might say, in a world that is shaped and yet held in check by the selectional bias of authorial intent.

Icons as pure-intentional objects lay the very groundwork for the presentational objects that arise with the higher strata, where the amalgamated contents of the concatenating correlates are further knit together into unified wholes. The correlate is thus pivotal for this stratification: the first two strata shape the correlate and in the last two strata a series of correlates fashion the fictional world of presented objects called “dargestellten Gegenständlichkeiten” by Ingarden (ibid.). These objects are thus the higher generate products that result cumulatively from several concatenating correlates, down to their precise (Iconic) aspects in which they must appear. That, indeed, is the contribution of the fourth stratum, much as the presentational aspects are preordained by the Icons and their Indexes that enter at the lower strata in accordance with authorial choice. A character is only what “his” or “her” Icons bear in material contents and relevant Indexes. Such are the peculiar properties of linguistic meaning when a pure referent obtains, without any ostensive backing from a concrete situational context. So organic is the relationship between object and aspect that the last two strata might be reduced to one. But from a heuristic standpoint the strata are better separated because they help demonstrate individually idiosyncrasies of meaning.

Ingarden’s Cognition of the literary work of art (1968, p. 264)--which was introduced with my ontological placement of language and will play a greater part in the ensuing chapter--additionally refers to wordsound formations and semantic unities as the “linguistic strata” (also Ingarden in Fieguth, 1976, p. 144). The last two strata then may be subsumed under a “presentational” qualifier. So the “ judgment” part of the correlate belongs to the linguistic strata and the “quasi-” prefix to the presentational or literary alternatives. Such a binary division also reinforces the break between Dicent and Argument through the “ judgment” both share in syntactic size. That is to say, in Argument only the linguistic strata take effect. The presentational strata are blocked from forming due to the perforation of the pure referent that adequation causes. Ingarden supports this bifurcation tacitly in the Literary Work of Art, since adequation is discussed toward the close of the chapter (section 24, pp. 164 ff.) covering the second stratum.

It is to Ingarden’s credit that he avoids the defaults of past critics, such as the Fregean neglect of a literary “sense.” Although Ingarden’s primary interest is non-adequated literary language, he deals with the adequated literal kind as well. So he adopts a method equal to the obverse and reverse order I proposed for maintaining logical consistency instead of developing alleged idiosyncrasies for poetry and/or metaphor that are basic to meaning. One logical outcome is that the pure referent as primary constituent carries out its presenting without the conflict in “(non-)denoting” that afflicts Fregeans and followers. Everything the Dicentic quasi-mirror bears a language owns naturally. This “nature” as ontic heteronomy is already arepresentational, grounded as it is in signitive acts instead of empirical facts.

To illustrate quasi-judgment, I return to the prosaic looking sentence from Argument, “My pen lies on the desk,” since non Aristotelian semantics must meet the challenge of surface identity. Certainly, the Icons as lexical elements look the same. But their essence differs from the moment this sentence opens a novel, for example. True, basic nominal-verbal unfolding and interlocking proceed as before (under Argument) at the level of the linguistic strata, where reference in transaction with transference forms the correlate. Indeed, any constitution of a correlate, be it Dicentic or Rhemic in size, follows the rules of “closure” shown by the graphs that were presented where I introduced the last trichotomy. Beyond those tasks, the correlate as quasi-judgment stays in sole control. Beginning in a vacuum at zero-point without any backing from a reality-nexus, the correlate has recourse to nothing but its own contents.

Negative as this change of conditions sounds, it remains entirely positive. Instead of being perforated through adequation, the pure referent begins to lay the fictional foundation. All it offers in the way of persons rests with the bare and schematic opening, “My.” This first-person possessive comes together with an object, the “pen,” and that in turn is located lying in the space provided by the prepositional phrase “on the desk.”“Who” is this “My” person, a man or woman, hero(ine) or villain, (dramatic) protagonist or antagonist? What significance does the “pen” play, and how will the fictive “space” widen from that one piece of furniture, the “desk,” to a possible room, house, or whatever? Recipients do not conjecture this way. Led by the Referent, they remain locked into the Icons, glued to what is there and not missing. That goes also for the relevant Indexes weighting the Icons in their material contents with special significance. Everything is to be derived piecemeal from the correlates in their progressive unfolding and concatenation.

Language, in a nonskepical view, serves a Recipient through its Referent as its natural, schematic ambiguity drives the concatenation forward in an inbuilt type of suspense--thus not necessarily of the contrived kind found in a thriller. Everything is meted out in the selected contents. The dynamic elasticity, so typical of heteronomous, pure intentional objects, permits meanings to incorporate the meaning of the fictional author through their own explicit and implicit denomination, in denotations and connotations. Beyond these contents, no one can check up on that “My” person, for instance; no vital statistics may compensate for what is not there. Only ensuing correlates offer more, a little at a time. But everything the correlates do provide is kneaded together into people and human preoccupations. Although these presentations go back no further than to their respective correlates, their ultimate composition transcends each single correlate.

With this kind of Iconic steering power, any paraphrase becomes truly a “heresy” (Brooks, 1947, pp. 192 213) for disrupting the quasi mirror. Since a translation induces paraphrasing, I could take the “fountain pen” as closer in meaning to the original “Füllfeder” than “pen,” but not the foregrounded “*fill-feather.” Translators, like Referents, must adhere to accepted Sinsign composites that culminate in the Legisigns validated by one inventory, and this has to be shared in indented signitive convolutions by a speech community. The “*fill-feather” does not fit into that inventory as oppositional value and thus would distort the translated quasi-mirror. Having a “*fill-feather” lie on the desk and/or belong to a “My”--would be meaningless, at least without the kind of text-critical apparatus often added to Elizabethan plays for readers of modern English.

When Icons become thus contextualized and expand Indexically in the elastic ambiguity that is theirs, the literary work they compose radiates its own unique “aura,” to borrow a term from Benjamin (1974, pp. 440, 489). A new, meaningful world comes to the fore with the unfolding and concatenating correlates, similar to the (symbolic) precept of disclosure cited with Heidegger’s etymological construal of Greek truth as “unhiddenness.” There is literally no predictable “telling” what the work will reveal and where it will end before it comes to a close, lending new significance to all its meanings, from the beginning on. The sequence of nominal-verbal unfolding and subequent concatenation is thus countered at depth by the organic constitution. In the hermeneutic relationship typical of purposive wholes, last and first elements determine one another.

Temporal issues of this nature are largely reserved for my next chapter. What should be clear from the start, however, is that even a seemingly superficial phenomenon such as length plays a crucial part in the formation of literary genres. Dicent requires a certain length for correlate concatenation to proceed so that the presentational strata may go into effect. Argument on the other hand, may be projected singly, as was shown in various instances, just because the reality-nexus provides such strong backing, particularly in ostensive usage. Therefore, the one sentence given here actually would stop dead at the linguistic strata without the “My,” for example, transcending its correlate to erupt eventually into a hero(ine) beyond this (proud) possessor of a pen. Accordingly, each correlate is something like a mosaic; Ingarden (1965, p. 217) speaks of “little stones” (Steinchen). Readers may interrupt their decoding which locks them into the Icons by leaning back to peruse the correlates bearing these contents at a distance. This “analytic” approach has the pure correlate manifest a type of blotchy tachism Ingarden renders with the adjective “fleckenartig,” meaning “mottled” or “speckled.”

All such phenomena reside in the essence of ontic heteronomy. The correlate of a pure referent is sprinkled with a series of Icons, such as the ones in the above sentence. Though cohering at depth through syntactic subject-and-object interaction, the correlate at its most explicit level seems to have varied material contents juggled together. These contents also rest in the schematic ambiguity that enables them to absorb the cumulative significance of the work. Argument could disambiguate the “My” through its objective referent, and I suggested such possibilities as having a person’s name engraved on the pen. But a fictional context has to render any such connection through unfolding correlates. In the case of the “pen” and “desk,” neither their colors nor contours are as yet disclosed, the way some were in Argument with the graphic counterparts. But this suppleness precisely succeeds where rigid ontic autonomy would fail.

To be sure, the correlate also manifests a type of rigidity that Ingarden (ibid., pp. 286 ff.) labels “Erstarrung.” Ironically, however, this curious finitude rests in the spontaneity of all autotelic domains, specifically the selectional bias once the choice has been made, in the past tense. When the regulative act of meaning (I) determines the reference (M) in transference (0) for the constituents of its choice, there is purposive fusion of the one to the whole once the correlate unfolds and interlocks. Beyond the correlate constituents, the concatenation also consists of a set number of correlates. Without this finitude, nothing could be “derived” (abgeleitet, ibid., pp. 122-123) from pure-intentional objects. While autonomous-objective entities are perceived in bounds that stay fluid, “fliessend” to Ingarden (pp. 167-168), heteronomous ones in their purposive yet piecemeal foundation are “finite” or “endlich” (p. 209) insofar as they are bound to their selection.

Take the “desk”: this is all the meaning yields from its Qualisign foundation on, whereas the real piece of furniture may be perceived from the front, the sides and back by walking around it, with the visual aspects changing accordingly. Although there is a type of “movement” with the correlate sequence and its concatenation, a decoder of texts gets only what the meanings yield. So the authorial will as act of meaning has ordained “My pen” and not anyone’s long or short, red or blue pen, much as “later” correlates may carry these other qualifiers, explicitly or implicitly. In that natural heuristic foundation of language, encoder becomes known to decoder through the text-down to the very generate depth of the full Index, where meanings expand in their connotations. So literary works are finished products insofar as a choice has gone into effect. This type of finitude is, however, counteracted at depth by Indexical expansion in the meaningful relevance these schematic contents attain.

There is no manufacturer of pens, only a manipulator of native English competence who wields “pen.” The person so far caught in the “My” possessive also has an identity as first presentational aspect of some fictional figure. That is an equivalent “birth” qua language, ontic heteronomy in new completion. When, however, the author works very consciously at manipulating the heuristic steering power of language, the aspects of potential reinforcement arise, Ingarden’s “paratgehaltene Ansichten” (pp. 282-288, 293-295, 301 302). These aspects accentuate the presenting prowess of language. A case in point is the stylistic device, known as “leitmotif,” which manifests reiteration of precise words for purposes of characterization and related emphasis. Ingarden uses the past participle “aufgezwungen” (pp. 282, 287, 293, 295, 301, passim) to underscore how these aspects are “forced” upon the Recipient by the Referent. Ironically, the extensive pagination shown for these aspects demonstrates Ingarden’s own critical reinforcement of them where his readers are concerned.

Certainly, leitmotifs are inescapable enough in their Iconic intensity to invest any character or object with an identity through a reiterated identifiable trait. For instance, if the syntagma “My pen” appears often, the fictional speaker behind the possessive starts coming across as being “possessive,” also self-assertive, perhaps, to the point of sounding defensive or aggressive in accordance with the development of the plot. Simultaneously the “pen” also assumes this Icon “My” as repeated presentational aspect. Fictional leitmotifs have long been popular and were utilized by such great novelists as Dickens, Flaubert, and T. Mann, among many others.

Ingarden’s reinforcing aspects, however, raise some concern: they are difficult to separate from ordinary (schematic) aspects, aside from conspicuous leitmotifs. The end result, again, would be left to the devices of the lexicon. To forestall that problem, let me suggest the following modification for which Ingarden actually provides the clue. After concluding the analysis of the four strata governing the literary work of art, he turns briefly to a nonliterary “scientific” (wissenschaftliche) alternative, “the mere report” (der blosse Bericht, pp. 350-353). This is where he rightly brings up again the transparency caused by the perforation of the adequating process. The explicit contents are drained of their rich semantic potential and thus bear aspects that are skeletal, he says, because of their function rather than appearance. Consequently, I took the hint and thus suggest that all adequated works carry schematic aspects since no genuine presentation takes place here anyway, as explained, while literary counterparts possess ipso facto reinforcing aspects irrespective of appearances. Since such works start at zero point, everything their Iconic Indexical potential offers becomes intensified as the only source for a fictive sphere, even if conspicuous leitmotifs further accentuate reinforcement.

So much for a structural solution of aspects. Ingarden’s opposite criterion to aspect reinforcement appears to be a phenomenon he (ibid., pp. 261-268 ff.) terms indeterminate spots or pockets, in German, “Unbestimmtheitsstellen.” These hollow pockets seem to have the opposite effect, but they affirm in their subtle way the pure essence of linguistic meaning. Tacitly, they occur wherever the schematic material contents are invoked. In mimetic augmentation, the pockets weight Icons with relevant Indexes bearing the significance of the whole, just because the meanings stay non adequated and thus “fill” out in their indigenous elasticity. Accordingly, these pockets parallel the conspicuous, explicit aspects as an implicit mode of reinforcement. Their indeterminateness then constitutes yet another seemingly negative factor that turns out to be positive. Certainly, few criteria of Ingarden’s theory have enjoyed more attention than these indeterminate pockets (Iser, 1975, pp. 234-235).

For an immediate illustration, “My pen” may be more determinate than if the noun were preceded by an article or appeared by itself. With this compounded stretch the indigenous pointer, the direction-factor, is somewhat less polyvalent within each material content. But no matter how many attributives surround the “pen,” these do not match the “determinate” vibrance of corporeal (autonomous real) materiality; there will be pockets in “pen” omitting its color, contours, or whatever. Positively viewed, that fact makes the selection of the contents all the more important. In any case, the degree of determinacy is not really at issue since these pockets become suffused with significance from their contextualization, at which I hinted when discussing the possible construal of the pride released with the “My” possessor. The concretization plays an important part in this unique permeation.

This element of pride could exemplify an aspect of speech-act theory that Ingarden does not neglect either, which is an illocutionary force, and to that can be added a perlocutionary resolve in the developing plot, such as affirming or denying ownership of the pen. Ingarden uses the term “Kundgabe” (ibid., pp. 40-41, 193 195) for this phenomenon of speech. That it resembles illocution becomes obvious from his examples: he offers questions, wishes, and commands. At the same time he stresses that these functions become subjugated to the fictional quasi-judgment sphere: there are no real questioners, respondents, or well-wishers. All these persons remain as fictive as their actions; all are caught within the network of the unfolding and concatenating correlates. Indeed, he (pp. 135-136) uses questions and commands as examples for proving the independence of ontic heteronomy, since they cannot refer directly to anything in the world in the manner of most declarative sentences.

A corollary of Ingarden’s “Kundgabe” in extended form at the level of the presentational rather than linguistic strata seems to be the “metaphysical qualities” (he took from Heidegger, pp. 310-319). Although the attributive is a bit difficult to justify in this context, the presence of these qualities is not: they emerge in the exultation or anguish of joy or fear, but do not in themselves compose a stratum. In a way, these qualities might be considered the perlocutionary impact in a fictional domain. They depend upon the intonation of words when enacted in dramatic performances, possibly making their entry behind the scenes through the stage directions, which are always read when a play is concretized that way rather than performed.

Yet another point of identity between Ingarden and the speech-act theoreticians concerns the issue of fictional “nonserious pretense” as well as a “parasitism,” concepts that are implicit in the “quasi-” prefix. Indeed, the quasi-mirror of linguistic presentation by its very nature resembles a type of game, of language at play, purporting to offer the “real” thing when this is not so. Basically, however, such a game is endemic in all purposive states by trading on the materials of existents for their own whim, something taken up effectively by Kant in his (Third) Critique of Judgment (Cassirer ed., V, 1914, pp. 266, 292, 295, 298).

Where aspects of the game surface in Ingarden, he also seems most likely to be misunderstood. Ingarden (1965, pp. 176, 178) suggests the game when he says that quasi judgments do not have their amalgamated direction-factor projected in the manner (Modus) of full “seriousness” (eines vollen Ernstes). Such ambiguous wording led critics not unjustly to disapprove of his “pseudo-statements” (Stankiewicz, 1977, p. 56). Yet Ingarden does state clearly a few pages hence (p. 182) that quasi judgments forge only an “Illusion der Realitat.” The capacity to create such an illusion of reality is indeed a power to be attributed to language in the area of the presenting strata. But even that point becomes partially misunderstood because in the context of discussing his idea of illusion Ingarden claims that quasi-judgments are not really “pure sentences” (keine reinen Aussagesätze). Also Gabriel (1975, p. 55), though generally discerning, was confused by such observations: is it not paradoxical to base quasi judgments on pure, non-adequated correlates while denying their identity? The answer is, theoretically, that a pure sentence stands for a non-adequated correlate whereas, positively, a quasi-judgment performs the presenting tasks demanded by the last two strata of a literary work of art.

Admittedly, the distinction may be too finely cut, since a pure sentence by itself is nothing. But in defense of Ingarden (ibid., pp. 164 ff.), his ontological dichotomy involving judgment versus quasi-judgment is there from the outset. And if he does seem to play at words here in raising the issue of seriousness, he is stating something in circumlocution that non-Aristotelian semantics has stressed all along, namely that the lexicon deludes. The non-adequated sentence looks “for real,” to put it simply, and gives the impression of being projected into the extralinguistic reality although this is not, and cannot be, the case. Some of these aspects concerning Ingarden’s poetics have been covered satisfactorily in a recent (1981) treatise by Falk. An earlier work on phenomenology by Magliola (1977, pp. 107-141) is also helpful in part but still grapples with Ingarden’s ontology between real and ideal autonomy as well as the “intentional object” belonging to ontic heteronomy. In view of some of Ingarden’s less than lucid definitions one may not wonder why Magliola (p. Ill) finds certain areas of the second linguistic stratum “very entangled” in explanation.

Experts on speech-act theory no doubt may point out also that notion’s of literary nonseriousness were familiar to them. True, Austin (1975, p. 22) touched on something that resembled a lack of adequation when he said of an actor’s performative utterance that it stayed “in a peculiar way hollow or void.” Austin then goes on to maintain that the language of poems or soliloquies is “used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use . . .”(ibid., his italics). To be sure, the pure referent feeds upon itself, in a manner of speaking. But the parasitism Austin posits suggests that literature exploits so-called normal use. Underlying such a literary parasitism is the notion among Fregean followers that the language of poetry and/or metaphor cannot denote or refer to anything without being propped up by standard language--a theory not far removed from the proxy-tenet.

Indeed, the East German critic, Bierwisch (1965, pp. 53, 59 ff.), espoused such a poetic parasitism in defense of lexical deviance (Abweichung). Not surprisingly, the Baumgärtner survey covering a linguistic poetics cited before (1969, pp. 26-27) rejected that theory as inconclusive, along with the rest of the recent attempts. Plett (1975, pp. 134-135) then dealt with Baumgärtner’s reaction to Bierwisch in terms of the imposition of “secondary structures” upon “normal” ones such a theory involves. The great advantage of Ingarden’s position is that the pure referent stays primary just because it never goes into adequation.

The idea of a literary parasitism coupled with the “pretense tenet” in nonserious performances were nevertheless passed on from Austin to followers. Two particular essays by Ohmann (1971) and Searle (1974-75) make that legacy evident. Even their phrasing is similar. Ohmann has “stretches of speech,” Searle “stretches of discourse”; Ohmann seizes on an illocutionary force which stays “mimetic,” Searle on an iliocutionary act that is “pretended.” Searle (ibid., p. 327) further makes his indebtedness to Austin explicit by quoting him on how an author of fiction “pretends to perform iliocutionary acts by way of actually performing phonetic and phatic acts.” In addition, Searle’s work on speech acts (1970, pp. 78-79) echoes Austin when he labels literary use a “parasitic discourse and meaning” aimed at a “let’s-pretend mode of discourge.”

A nice colloquial description, if one goes in for that kind of thing! Of greater benefit may be Searle’s two planes which distinguish “horizontal conventions of fiction” from “vertical connections of serious speech” (ibid., pp. 327, 331). As my next chapter will reveal, succession in non-adequated (“nonserious’?) spheres like those of quasi-judgments is indeed confined to textual chronologies rather than to the vertical historicity of genuine temporal succession, no matter how faithfully time becomes simulated through the quasi-mirror. If Searle got that far with fictional time, he unfortunately did not extend that wisdom to fictional space, since he is inconsistent enough to claim (ibid., p. 330) that “London” and “Baker Street” in a Conan Doyle novel, for instance, remain “non-fictional” vestiges. What Searle should have said was just the opposite: these lexical place names, too, become incorporated into what he terms the horizontal conventions of fiction. So here is a typical case of being deluded by the nonserious pretense of a lexical quasi-mirror.

Fortunately my textual analyses will contain so many place names that, by the end of this study, no one will be able to doubt their use in non-adequated, horizontal, structures. At least, Searle touches on the very problem this study has taken up. He (1974-75, p. 320) realizes that the traditional “metaphor” may occur either in “fiction” or “nonfiction.” Then he adds that “some jargon” is needed to keep “metaphorical” synonymous with “nonliteral” while opposing “fictional utterances” which are instead “nonserious.” Searle is trying to say that “metaphor,” as he understands it, should not be “serious” just because it is “nonfictional” or “literal,” and yet it cannot be “nonserious” if it is definitely not “fictional” or “literary.”

Well, non-Aristotelian semantics will provide what Searle irreverently calls the “jargon” which places metaphor categorically within its structure, just because a localized, lexical surface fails to sever the literal from the literary alternative as he just proved. That is to say. the non-Aristotelian metaphor will be “nonserious” in Searle’s terminology insofar as it stays non-adequated no matter what its surface registers, and yet it will be “nonfictional” by not sharing the constitutional unit(y) of Dicent. When separated by proper functional differences, “metaphor” evolves as a structural idiosyncrasy that cannot die or disappear as it did in the Ingendahl Experiment. The structure to which it belongs as micro-component is the Rheme, and the works that harbor it partake of lyric poetry. Though based fundamentally on Ingarden’s phenomenological semantics, this structure required modification because his theory did not take it up in detail. Indeed, Ingarden (1965, p. 188) had to defend himself against Käte Hamburger by saying that as a foreign speaker he deemed it inappropriate to tackle such a language-bound phenomenon as lyric poetry.

Actually, Ingarden’s Cognition of the literary work of art, which (my study has indicated) first came out in Polish, does cover lyric poetry. This work becomes more relevant for my next chapter on concretization, and that it does may prove in itself that Ingarden did not explore the lyric construct with the same consistency he applied to fiction. Of immediate relevance to my analysis may be merely a comment from a Polish essay that was translated into German (Fieguth, 1976, pp. 102 ff.) and finds him probing the experimentalist style of a native poet, Tuwim. Ingarden notes that such a poem yields no genuine presentation of fictional objects since it lacks the progressive continuity of plot formation.

What became apparent to Ingarden in this extreme case applies categorically to the Rheme. A plot is obviously something lyric poetry does not possess: the Rheme tells no story, is not preoccupied with “doings”--in my translation of the Aristotelian “prattontes” (Käte Hamburger, 1968, p. 17). To be sure, Icons always “present” through the very material contents they carry. That is the natural function of explicit contents, for which reason they are made so easily the target of erroneous categories, as in the case of the traditional metaphor. However, the Icons that go “up” the strand into the Rheme have become expressants--objects of expression for a totality of expression within which lies embodied the authorial will. The correlate, called “poetic intext,” is no longer syntactic but contextual. That is to say, correlation as embodied in the double-intentionality between act of meaning and meanings proceeds through teleological “closure” as before, but the transaction between reference and transference now extends to the circumference of the entire context.

The impact of those changed conditions will be given after adding some relevant pointers from Peirce (1960, p. 150, par. 2.264), taken again from his ten sign classes. My selected presentation here of the Peircean Rheme might be expressed figuratively as the degenerate “left corner” of his schema.

As with Dicent, the term “Rhematic” appears in the attributive, which is not suitable for designating a vital structure in non-Aristotelian semantics. The part of the Peircean schema included above, moreover, was not chosen for the “Rhematic” qualifier alone but also for its linkage with the “Iconic”--made “iconic” in this conspicuous association, I might add. Out of a total of six Rhematic classes, Peirce’s other “Rhematic” signs accompany the “Indexical Singsign” (III), “Indexical Legisign” (VI), and “Symbol Legisign” (VIII). So in semiotic hierarchy of generation, the Rhematic ascends to eight of Peirce’s ten sign classes, with “Dicent” interspersed (in IV and VII). When one confronts his whole schema, the Rhematic factor sustains that diagonal “left-corner” appearance even after adding all these sign classes.

The Iconic “corner” is relevant to my own placement of the Rheme at “M.” While this M locus applies to the third trichotomy, it reflects the Icons in that M-position within their second trichotomy. Now that the open format of the last trichotomy is complete, one may well contrast the Rheme with the other two structures. In what is for the strands a “degenerate” direction although a hierarchy between them does not count, the Rhemic M-level might exemplify a “Hypoicon”; it neither shapes the fictional “objects” governing Dicent at 0-locus nor accounts for an “objective” referent, as did Argument at I.

My allusion to the Hypoicon for the structure that bears the functional metaphor may seem apt. The Hypoicon came up in discussing Peirce, who used the term for his semiotic metaphor. However, at the time, I stated that as single entity Peirce’s concept was not far removed from the traditional metaphor with its localized analogy-in-anomaly precept and the proxy barter this induced. Peirce (1960, p. 157, par. 2.277) focused on the representation of a representamen that represents “a parallelism in something else.” The phrasing I reiterate here verbatim has analogy and anomaly clad in the respective “parallelism” and “(something) else”--to the extent that the fidelity to tradition harks back to Aristotle’s concept for semantic alienation, the “allotrios,” which surfaces in the adjunct of this study. But even those who followed Peirce could not improve on that inherently lexical orientation of the Hypoicon, as was shown with Bense’s turtledove Johanna, whose terms of endearment certainly clung to Legisign neutrality and thus could not be contained by structure.

Nor were Peirce’s other Rhematic signs included in the above schema, simply because they do not have sufficient bearing on any facet of non-Aristotelian semantics. “Sinsign” and “Index” have their locus at Object-relation, while “Legisign” and “Symbol” occopy the Interpretant corners of the respective M-0 trichotomies. To be sure, the signs that enter a structure are branded by that structure, so that from the first Qualisign on, the signs have to be “Rhemic” (“Rhematic”) when they forge lyric poetry. That condition applies so unilaterally that I omitted it from the presentations although not without a comment.

As for my suggestion of using “Hypoicon” to characterize the entire Rheme as structure, this works in the way of a reminder that the M-base becomes a type of logo for “Metaphor” as well and, indeed, for a distinctively “metonymic” parts-to-whole relation that remains nonlexical. Neither Johanna nor a string of endearments affect this relation but only the extension of one correlate for a context which no longer is shaped by a series of smaller, concatenting correlates. Since non-Aristotelian semantics has proceeded methodically in an obverse and reverse order, “transference” as such is not at issue but only a modified-specifically an expanded-form of transference. Accordingly the Rheme becomes differentiated systematically from Dicent and Argument in the switch from a syntactic to a contextual type of correlate that stays also non adequated in usage. The “literal” language of Argument is thus cut off categorically from the literary “metaphor” of the Rheme. And structurally, Dicent bears neither literal language nor metaphor. The colorful, deviant lexicon can still be described as “metaphor” in any of these structures but certainly stays loose “jargon,” to echo Searle, just because of that ubiquity.

Even non-Aristotelian semantics may draw on the convenience of concrete manifestations, although never with the idea of reifying these by making them into “semantic” criteria of function. One case in point is size, which may be distinguished as Dicentic length versus Rhemic width. Ironically, it is the extended correlate of the Rheme that necessitates the greater brevity, although when followed through logically, this makes sense. Dicentic concatenation needs a degree of progression, if without specifying the length in actual number of words; Rhemic breadth cannot absorb the same voluminous continuum. Beyond appearances, the reason for curbing size concerns the manner in which poetic intext acquires its circumference. The act of meaning (I) that Icons (M) corporealize and Indexes (0) embody becomes engendered directly through the contextual whole. In mimetic augmentation, this whole forms indirectly, since constitution begins within the smaller units of the correlates and then progresses with their concatenation. Argument is not confined to size, since the reality-nexus supports the single statement, as was brought out with the idioms, while extended written works undergo depletion anyway through the perforation of each concatenating correlate.

With the breadth of the Rheme, the activities of reference and transference--Ingarden’s “Meinen” and “Vermeinen”--span the whole through each part. Each micro-component as structural metaphor consists of a centrifugal Icon whose reference causes the poetic expression to unfold and whose centripetal Index shifts with the extended transference to release the connotations relevant to the whole in maximal compounding. In this manner, the Rhemic constituent effects constitution between the one and the whole as direct part of an entire context. Micro-component and macro-structure then become immediately intertwined as cohering lyric ego or subject at depth. Yet “ego” is a constitutive principle here, implicit in a poetic Referent; it does not apply to a psychological disposition or an author as “person” who is rendered in an “l,” or in the “My” above, for that matter.

This Rhemic extension from syntax to poetic context is thus the only other possible alternative for positing a structure based on units natural to language in the constitution of a correlate. To be sure, when the text exhibits concrete evidence, the structure is easiest to prove. A surface registering disrupted syntax down to asyndetic elements projects the Rheme conspicuously. In view of my analysis, I can add that such a surface substantiates the Rheme at depth. At the same time, non-Aristotelian semantics claims that even when sentences are present they are no longer the fundamental constitutive unities where this structure is concerned.

If a last alternative, the Rheme has to encompass the experimental endeavors of Concrete Poetry as well. This postwar trend really tries to “concrete” the M-base, down to its most degenerate material in Qualisign dispositions. Words cluster together while shaping patterned “Constellations” (Gumpel, 1976, pp. 90 ff.). Instead of tightly interwoven lyric contexts, the Concretist vignettes give rise to loose “connexes.” Their selected Icons and Indexes appear so disparate in choice that they resemble discrete vocables, keeping the transaction between reference and transference at a minimum. Whatever the variation in Concrete Poetry, none is so drastic as to require a separate structure. Although the loose connexes seem “open,” a selection of contents has occurred as always, demarcating authorial choice in teleological fusion through the closure discussed. Perhaps it seems less fitting to call components of these connexes outright “metaphor,” just because transference has been attenuated as noted. But then again, the minimal regulation of Indexes by an act of meaning permits these to burgeon in their implicit range, with few implications suppressed, since none becomes irrelevant. In that respect, then, connotative compounding is met. And Concrete Poetry certainly fits into the non-Aristotelian division: since it possesses neither a syntactic circumference nor an adequated objective referent, Dicent and Argument are ruled out, leaving the Rheme.

The changed priorities of the Rheme logically influence two vital areas. One of them concerns syntactic hierarchy and the other stratification. With syntax no longer in constitutive control, the noun is no longer highest in that constitution. Expressed positively, every Rhemic particle as structural metaphor is a noun in essence. Of course, I am applying Ingarden’s dynamic phenomenological interpretation of the noun here, which was “objectification of the meant.” This task now extends directly from the single constituted to poetic intext, causing the direction-factor to intensify as though it possessed the range of the pointer nouns carry, even when operative signs rather than eidetic ones are involved. Semantic functioning at the level of the Rheme is thus a process of nominalization (Gumpel, 1971), embedded in the extended transference of these non-Aristotelian metaphors. With nominalized expansion rather than mimetic augmentation in the presenting Ingarden had claimed for fiction, the strata, too, have to be modified as shown.

RHEMIC STRATA

1) LINGUISTIC WORDSOUND: HYLETIC BASE

2) SEMANTIC UNITIES: EXTENDED TO INTEXT

3) BACKGROUNDED LYRIC EGO: INDEXICALIZATION

4) FOREGROUNDED LYRIC EGO: ICONIZATION

The original binary division of two linguistic and two literary types of strata is kept intact. First, there must be wordsound formations yielding semantic thresholds that Legisigns have validated. Except for Concretist extremes, semantic unities must also form. Due to the contextual immediacy of the Rheme, however, the second stratum is harder to separate from the following two, for which reason I almost reduced Rhemic strata to three in all. Semantic unities, after all, cohere differently when backgrounding is next in line. Still, there is cursory interlocking especially when whole sentences are present, no matter how amplified these become from the full nominalization. This coherence spreads to a fully backgrounded and foregrounded lyric ego at the third and fourth strata. With the final stratum, the original wordsound becomes nominalized: the compounded connotations seep into the M-base, reaching all the way “back” to the degenerate sonorous and visual Qualisigns.

It should be a foregone conclusion for Rhemic immediacy that the foregrounded M-base cannot be severed from its compounded background in the manner of the automatized expressions that were discussed with the Czech Structuralists. On the contrary, so interwoven are these strata that bilingual versions should always accompany a translated text of the Rheme. Then decoders may see at least the original foregrounding of the M-base even if it cannot be transported closely enough into the other language. From a pragmatic standpoint, the greater brevity of the Rheme facilitates such bilingual presentations. My treatment of the textual analyses will underscore the crucial need for such considerations given the literary strata of the Rheme.

Indeed, so intimate is that coherence in the Rheme that a recursiveness obtains, and not just for the verbal direction-factor that meets and interlocks with a preceding nominal counterpart in a syntactic correlate. Rather, that recursiveness was insinuated when I described the nominalized wordsound as flowing “back” into the M-base after full generation of the strata. That is also why I kept all four strata. The linguistic strata go forward with the sequence to effect the semantic unities cursorily; the literary-Rhemic strata permeate the whole in a backward direction, giving the backgrounded, nominalized parts their full chance to intensify in every corner of poetic intext, in a vertical as well as horizontal dimension. So semantic unities are forged but not reinforced in full compounding until pulled through--to put it simply--the last two strata of backgrounding and foregrounding. Because of that recursiveness, in fact, Rhemic foregrounding displays utmost fusion on the surface; “meaning” here penetrates to not only the selection of explicit and implicit denominations but their very positioning. Accordingly, the constituents do not fall as they may at the edge of a page but have been carefully spaced in their textual sectors. In view of these changed conditions, let me offer a listing of priorities.

The elements in parentheses are optional, the others obligatory. A title may be omitted in lyric poetry although it plays a vital part when added by the poet. In the recursive nature of this structure, the title-to-text relation has the text rush forward while simultaneously the title gains in significance “back” at the top, where it appears in this table. This significance may be reinforced explicitly at the Iconic level or implicitly at the Indexical level. Either the title is concretely expressive by matching the material contents of a text or it is mainly interpretive of the import that evolves. Käte Hamburger (1968, pp. 213, 214), though using the dichotomy of “object-relation” versus “subject-relation,” made me cognizant of this distinction between title and text.

The “Text,” following a title when present, then introduces a couple of other optional elements. Whether optional or oligatory, the textual listings to the left divide vertically into micro-components and to the right into corresponding macro-components. Thus “word” is met horizontally with “line” in obligatory pairing while the “sentence” and “stanza” become the optional counterparts. “Metaphor” is complemented by “intext” as constitutional unit(y) and the fully “nominalized” (backgrounded and foregrounded) meaning coheres as “lyric ego.” The task of each element is to serve as “object of expression” for the “totality of expression” that goes with authorial intent. All Rhemic constituents thus equal “expressants” instead of the (progressive) fictional “emergents.” Of course, the left-sided specifications are just facets of the structural metaphor.

There is a reason for the extended listing and the various facets. First, the “word” is not to be taken too literally. The textual analyses will reveal that “metaphor” as nominalized meaning and/or object of expression--may sink to the level of a punctuation mark! So “word” affirms mainly a unit smaller than the sentence or phrase. Second, the poetic line, though one convenient mark for identifying the presence of the Rheme, needs the kind of underpinning it is given in the table above just because both Dicent and Argument may contain it. Shakespearean drama is one case in point, while any versified commercial jingle proves as much for Argument. There are thus “lyric” accouterments outside of the Rheme which do not account for structure. To be sure, the line of Dicent also breaks up syntax and depends on a degree of recursiveness. But the Dicentic line is nevertheless subordinated to mimetic augmentation in concatenating correlates. And the perforation caused by the adequating process blocks thorough foregrounding and backgrounding in some commercial use of the line. Although the line is mandatory for the Rheme, its outer ubiquity thus necessitates the type of backing the Rhemic hierarchies above include.

All three structures have now been analyzed, the two literary ones so far only as constructs. Let me repeat that these structures are based on units natural to the disposition of linguistic meaning, to the point of permitting no further alternatives, unless there is an interest in historical genres, in which case I recommend the detailed exploration of genre theories by Hempfer (1973, pp. 18-19, 23, 143, passim), although his is the typical diachronic approach that offers little genuine synthesis beyond describing the varied theories of critics past and present.

Now, what of the “pen” sentence? It was carried forward from Argument to Dicent, and nothing is to stop lexical neutrality from letting it open a line of a poem. However, because of the immediate, recursive nature of poetic intext, this structure is toughest to fragment for the heuristic purpose of illustration. Also, aspects of concretization assume greater importance in the Rheme than in the case of the other two structures, for which reason more detailing will be postponed. The subsequent textual analyses, however, are exhaustive, let the reader be assured. They will not proceed either without pointing out advantages of a non-Aristotelian over a neo-Aristotelian metaphor left to localized spotsighting. The only identity between the two principles may well be the etymology of the original “metaphora” to suggest that “transference” matters to both if hardly as a function opposing reference.

Briefly, the possessive “My” initiating this correlate is not the holistic lyric ego despite the first-person Icon. As Rhemic particle, this “My” becomes ipso facto a metaphor, a nominalized meaning though outwardly still an operative sign. The “My” thus interlocks at the horizontal level with elements of its line and at recursive-vertical levels with titular elements, if present, as well as textual components; anaphoric, prosodic, assonantal, rhyming, and alliterative relations form and eventually heighten this Sinsign composite in foregrounded Qualisign resonance. An otherwise modest entry, “My” is here an object of expression, fixed in exact location just because it coheres precisely with the whole as one speck occupying space in a totality of expression.

While a basic presenting of the “My” as “person” may not be eradicated from the Iconic material content, it hangs suspended instead of being cumulatively augmented as in Dicent; no presentation converts the “My” into one aspect of a fictional character. Rather, the priority goes to what the “My” contributes to the whole through its Iconic value and Indexical interlocking, even if full construal is even less predictable here without a whole context. The point is, nevertheless, that the overt possessive as operative sign has become a nominalized meaning, a functional metaphor geared to constitution of the whole through its own denominations. The textual analyses will hold a few surprises in store for the reader by demonstrating how far such a constituent may strain in this task. A unique coherence results from that “metonymic” relation of carefully spaced parts to the whole. That is about as much as can be disclosed before dealing with the concretization of these two literary constructs--next.

Dicent and Rheme in Concretization: Time and Stance Through Genre

Concretization is the term Ingarden uses for assimilating a literary work of art, when a construct assumes what he (1965, pp. 353 ff.) calls “life” (Leben) as it passes through the consciousness of a reader. This topic will be discussed in conjunction with time and stance. Concretization is time incarnate. As a process, indeed a processing of the construct, concretization proceeds in phases that synchronize the continuity of decoding with the encoded sequence of a work. Stance promotes such synchronization; it is a constitutive rather than psychologistic principle and will be accompanied by the concept of a “superreader.” Although the term resembles the “archilecteur” Riffaterre (1975, pp. 177-181) introduced as a means of responding to textual control, my superreader is adapted to the structural divisions of non-Aristotelian semantics.

The issues surrounding time and stance in the area of concretization are certainly complex, occasionally to the point of seeming paradoxical. Since the textual analyses follow, all the idiosyncrasies involving the constructs and their concretization recur and are thus clarified further in the full application of my theory. The applied part also includes Argument with its reality-nexus, since all three structures are then to be tested empirically. On occasion Argument also enters into this discussion, particularly when needed to indicate differences that affect the presence of a reality-nexus, because the juxtaposition with an objective referent induces the presence of (autonomous-)real time and space in language.

Even my exposition up to this point has provided a variety of clues that should seem vital to concretization. Despite the fact that literary genres do not partake of “real” time because they lack a reality-nexus, they give rise to temporal features at the level of the linguistic and the literary strata. The strata themselves embody an element of succession through their hierarchy. That the linguistic strata go by sequence was indicated above when I mentioned the synchronization effected during concretization. But even that relatively conspicuous evidence is eradicated by the fact that word order is not consonant with hierarchies of semantic constitution. There is succession on the surface and teleological fusion at depth; the organic whole knows no “first” or “last” based on sheer sequence. In Dicent the word order of the syntactic correlate is partially countered by the recursive direction-factor of the verb, and in the Rheme the entire poetic intext is characterized by a recursive trait that prevents doing justice to the title until the text has been read. While all extensive nominal-verbal unfolding in modern Western languagues occurs in a left-to-right sequence, this order is countermanded by the intensive nominal-verbal interlocking, or the connotative compounding of the Rheme. Without such organic interaction, no “closure” occurs and no semantic contiguities arise.

Icons, too, may reflect time through their material contents. Yet it is that degenerate “material” of Qualisign sound or print which ironically survives Icons by existing permanently in (autonomous-)real time and space. When written, Qualisigns cling to their pages even after their language has died. What they lack then is the semantic threshold which resides in the first linguistic stratum of (sonorous and visual) wordsound formations. However, as long as Qualisigns stay suffused with full generation, they support the four strata the constructs own; they are never material replicas of words but the very “ground” of the entire purposive work they compose.

If that ground never becomes activated, however, even when there is every chance of doing so, the construct also loses touch with the times: the only means of bringing literary works back into time is, indirectly, through the interlocutory partnership consisting of historically determined beings. If less than a handful of literary scholars peruse a work just long enough to paraphrase its fable or the gist of its lyric expression for others, an artificial mediation exists between a Referent and Recipient. A construct needs active “renewal” of communication between an encoding Referent and a decoding Recipient, as well as the multiple Recipients among one another. One might quip and say that the further generation of a work depends on the future generations of readers; the work survives as they revive it in different periods. As long as these concretizing agents share the signitive convolutions and linguistic indentations of the inventory a Referent used in selection, they may become effective Recipients of the work.

Drawing all that information together from the standpoint of temporal perspectives, a work bears a past as inception, and breaks into the present through its immediate concretization. Since concretization is never cut off, the work enjoys a “posterity” in the future as well. A unique contemporaneousness thus clings to the work, yet its past cannot be buried. The linguistic strata keep the meanings anchored in the lingo of their period and the literary strata bring the construct forward in ever expanding meaningfulness. Accordingly, the linguistic strata fix the time of diachronic stages, while the literary stata, trading on atemporal synchronic states, keep time fluid. The linguistic strata thus force a Recipient to “return” to the stages of oppositional values reached at the time of Referent inception. Once the stages have been recognized as synchronic states of an earlier inventory, the reception can bring the Referent forward in the growth the work experiences as it “speaks” to succeeding generations of Recipients.

The linguistic strata register the idiolect of their author in commonplaces current at the time of inception, even if a work is anonymous. When not misread--as mistaken lexical deviance!--these commonplaces become part of the poetic diction that identifies a Referent in many works. The incipient perpetuation of a work then immortalizes its author. That is to say, through the “life” a work attains from concretization its creator, though long dead, continues to live. A human corpse cannot be activated in the manner of degenerate linguistic Qualisigns. To be sure, sometimes the popularity of a work over time is cyclical rather than linear.

An illustration for the ramified temporal aspects covered so far is yet another Shakespearean work, Hamlet. Its language, Elizabethan English, is essentially “dead” since no one today shares this inventory except at a written and mostly literary level. All modern Recipients, therefore, must “return” to the Elizabethan oppositional system where this differs from their own English or misconstrue Icons that still appear extant but not in the same indented Indexes. A text-critical apparatus may be needed although it will function as an artificial mediating “Recipient” between the interlocutory partners. Fortunately, the majority of Elizabethan Legisigns are still sufficiently intact to permit the work to become concretized often, in readings or performances, so that it may stay “alive” instead of sitting on dusty shelves as Qualisigns. Because such reactivation has been possible, the work has grown in value throughout the years, with the advent of Freudian psychology, or whatever. At the level of the literary presenting strata there has been growth, but the linguistic strata continue to reflect unchanged the Elizabethan era.

Accordingly, the diachronic linguistic strata of Hamlet bear ipso facto the historical background of Shakespeare’s own English, from whose inventory he selected Icons and Indexes. Conversely, the choice of historical background for the plot of his drama at the literary level was entirely up to Shakespeare once he dealt with Legisigns validated in his era. The same rule applies to the space: even the geographical verisimilitude of setting Hamlet’s Elsinore in Denmark is only a signitive game for that simulating quasi-mirror, a theatrical illusion that should not delude an astute Recipient as reader or spectator of the drama. Denmark, the country in that Northern Baltic region, does not come to the text as an adequated reference; this Iconic “country” has as its “ground” only degenerate Qualisign material, going back no further. Yet from that material arises a fictional country whose “rotten” state has become famous for all time. This work is cited also because it opens auspiciously with something like the street cry that came up variously while discussing Peirce: a “Who’s there?”uttered by castle guards rings out on streets and over moats paved with words. “There” or “here,” “now” or “then” are adverbs in Icons that have relinquished their space and time, beyond their validation for a language which in this case sees modern English match its Elizabethan forebear.

Any concretization thus resuscitates a construct, curiously by bringing it back into a new time period with its old time intact. This “old” diachronic time, above the Elizabethan English, proves indirectly that the author began as speaker, deploying Argument in full contact with the empirical reality and through interlocutory partnership with other speakers of that era, none of whom may have possessed the skills of a Shakespeare. Behind the validated Icons and Indexes deployed by these speakers resides the (semiotic) Symbol which in its motility mediated the feedback and feedforward that recorded the modes of externalizing Elizabethan English as it internalized them for future recall. Through this activity, Elizabethan English became indented and preserved in the signitive convolutions its speakers shared intersubjectively and of which the linguistic strata continue to provide the proof.

Although many ordinary speakers may never deploy literary language themselves, they possess the full power of recognition they need in order to communicate with such a dramatist or poet. They may have acquired their “Mother” tongue by projecting language into the extralinguistic reality first. But soon they confront the “fictional” base of fairy tales as well as the “lyric” mnemonics of nursery rhymes, since all my structures are based on units natural to language. A superreader thus monitors appropriate Recipient compliance with comparative ease. Recipient stance is the means of culling the Referent as authorial will (I) from explicit and implicit components (M-0), and everything divulged above applies to that rule. Through stance, Recipient “meets” Referent by way of the text. Obviously, nothing like the “intentional Fallacy” of Wimsatt and Beardsley (1967, pp. 3-18) is involved in such a meeting ground: “people” or “persons” with their private thoughts, motives, sensations, and purely biographical backgrounds are not at issue. The point is that the “mind” of an author as creator of a work resides as constitutive consciousness within that work, specifically through the words it comes to carry.

The reciprocal roles first presented in discussing the Picture of Language showed that a single author or poet often becomes numerically countermanded by the multiple recipience of a “public.” The superreader thus resembles in function a type of collective noun by appearing mostly in the singular and yet covering an effective readership at large. This use of the singular is an exception and may thus occasion the use of sexist pronouns, something this study has tried studiously to avoid. But the singular has certain benefits. It underscores the fact that concretization is always individual, as all conscious acts have to be, even in the more passive role of Recipient rather than Referent. Despite the one concretizing subject, all “ subjective” inclinations nevertheless stay suppressed, affirming the “inter-” link for the intersubjective state. This state is the only recourse to any “objectivity” for purposive media such as language, including the meanings that compose Hamlet’s state of Denmark.

As for the “super-“ prefix of the “reader,” its positive connotations are supposed to stress the fundamentally ideal condition on which this study has relied from the start. Thus little or no emphasis will be put on distractions, pathological aberrations, outside interruptions, and related obstacles that cause flawed concretizations through various mechanics of construal. Naturally, borderline cases that threaten the “super-”prefix in vital areas of semantics will come up in their proper place.

When concretization in conjunction with time and stance has been analyzed exhaustively, I shall add just a brief survey to indicate where these issues surfaced before and what became of them. Since I mentioned Riffaterre in conjunction with the superreader, let me begin there. I draw on the essay that aimed to rectify an approach to (Baudelaire’s) poetry others had attempted. Under one of the sections entitled “The Poem as a Response” (1966, pp. 202-205) the superreader is cited as a convenient “tool of analysis” by mediating between the poet’s “message and the addressee-the reader.” The superreader, says Riffaterre, manages to “reconstitute” a “context” and keeps the “contact” decidedly “assured by the control the message has over the reader’s attention ...” The idea of reconstitution and contact through textual control is apt. But, unfortunately, Riffaterre’s approach does not by-pass lexical deviance by implication when he declares in the same context that where the text “holds up” the superreader one may reckon with “poetic structure.”

Plainly, Riffaterre goes nowhere near far enough. A hold up of this nature relies on surface oddity, which can happen in any of the three structures when the language is not that conspicuously “literal” or “literary.” Therefore I turn once again to Ingarden, although Riffaterre will be cited sporadically. This time, it is Ingarden’s Cognition which plays a major part in the ensuing analysis. Dicent and Rheme are semiotic concepts but, ontologically, they need to be boosted by phenomenological semantics. Similar to Riffaterre’s above reconstitution is Ingarden’s “Rekonstruktion” in the Cognition (1968, p. 294; see also excerpt in Warning, ed., 1975, pp. 57-58).

Concretization thus reconstitutes and/or reconstructs a literary work of art. In its most rudimentary aspect, time is to be detailed first as succession in terms of the sequence which surfaces as horizontal chronology. Concretization adjusts the encoded syntagma to the decoding process. This synchronization affects modern literary works of art in visual or orthogrpahic dimensions since the oral tradition is ancient. But mute sound accompanies the visual base as well, for which reason I kept Ingarden’s “wordsound.” My study on the whole has concentrated more heavily on the written language, even while treating Argument, since my own role as author facilitates an illustration in written form. Here I display the left-to-right sequence, for instance, as it spills over onto the line below when the edge of the page has been reached. Accordingly, the syntactic correlates break apart on the surface, if not as units of semantic constitution, as they are pushed onto the next line. Conversely, the line of verse curbs sequence by predetermining all breaks.

Ingarden uses for sequence the term “Aufeinanderfolge” (1965, pp. 326 ff.; 1968, pp. 95 ff.). In a literal translation the term refers to the manner in which elements “follow (upon) one another.” What the sequence of encoding and decoding reflects is the inner consciousness of time, which philosophers have recognized at least since Kant. At its level, linguistic sequence thus reinforces the “mental” origin of ontic heteronomy as pure-intentionality. Since even Argument forms first at the pure referent, this basic condition applies to all structures. After all, despite the reality-nexus Argument acquires through the objective referent, it shares the linguistic strata with the other two structures.

Moreover, the overt sequence becomes counteracted by covert simultaneity. The act of reading counters the act of meaning that extends holistically along the length and breadth of any correlate, small or extended as in the Rheme. That is to say, thetic generation and/or double intentionality, as this involves the transaction between reference and transference, must stay atemporal. Otherwise there would be no teleological unit(y) where first and last elements mutually determine one another irrespective of the precise word order. Consequently, only the actual act of reading takes place in real, vertical time, with minutes and hours ticking away, days or months passing. The sheer temporal occurrence of concretization is thus Newtonian enough to permit the more mechanical types of measures just cited. Larger Dicentic works have their concretization interrupted and meted out in other, later periods. A novel also may be serialized in some journal over months or years. Such a duration, built on interruptions, could heighten suspense in so-called cliffhangers as well as weaken concentration sufficiently to impair the “super “prefix of the reader by operating under these less than ideal temporal conditions.

Just as degenerate Qualisign material stays with a work, so does real vertical time in historical occurrence cling to the act of reading. However, minutes or hours do not satisfy that “inner” aspect of satisfactory superreader assimilation. Accordingly, Ingarden’s Cognition (1968, pp. 106-107, ff.) introduces qualitative in addition to quantitative time phases. Contradictory as qualitative time sounds, it remains valid as an appropriate mnemonic device which monitors the requisite assimilation. Though stated by Ingarden to be ruled by a “time differential” (Verschiedenzeitigkeit) among readers or readings, the qualitative phases resist mechanical time. Their “clock-time” (Uhr-Zeit) is still temporal insofar as qualitative phases have one phase yield to the next. But the priority here is on grasping the deeper semantic integration and not on a time span doled out in set amounts. Obviously, Riffaterre’s notion of textual control is relevant to these qualitative phases as more complex works lengthen their duration. (Since mnemonic phases embody “inner time,” it is not surprising that Ingarden in this context mentions the early exponent on this subject, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, 1859-1941).

Next is what I shall designate epochal time, which governs discrepancies between the inception and reception of a literary work of art. The epochal dichotomy was implicit in my introductory comments on the diachronic and synchronic distinctions. Where there exists an epochal gap between inception and reception, alert superreaders must “return” to the inception because this mirrors the linguistic inventory of the era in which the work was written. The epochal time factor is tremendously important for the traditional view of metaphor, just because neo-Aristotelians neglect it by not making that return. Instead they foist their own sensation of deviance upon an earlier language which, obviously, would bear some “strange” elements. What these critics do is to superimpose wrong reception on inception, resulting in an exegetic practice as fallacious as that used by early analysts of the Bible--as the adjunct will demonstrate.

Today, of course, the mass media exert such control that Ought-Values normalize swiftly into Is-Values: the odd wording of today becomes the semantic staple of tomorrow. Conditions can change rapidly either way as commercial jingles automatize today what remains unused tomorrow, reverting to an Ought-Value. All of these conditions would exacerbate determining a semantic item on the basis of familiarization even if some aspect of frequency could be measured, thus dooming the neo-Aristotelian metaphor more than ever. Regarded positively, epochal inception, too, endows a work with life through the constitutive consciousness of a Referent, just because the encoding act occurs at a certain period of historical time. That is how language even in literature preserves some attachment to the extralinguistic reality without being anchored in it. Reception, as already indicated, then perpetuates the “life” of a work and indirectly that of the author as Referent by respecting epochal distance instead of closing it artificially in ignorance. Inception thus dates the work, while reception conversely has it transcend any date when the epochal perspective is observed.

To illustrate epochal time with the Icon “weed” in two other Shakespearean plays, there is Henry VIII (if somewhat doubtful in authorship) and Twelfth Night. In the former work (V, i, 52-53, Harrison, ed., 1952, p. 1537) the Icon is Indexicalized to convey a human rogue, rendered as a “rank weed” one must “root . . . out.” As basic reference to a plant, the word is familiar to modern speakers of English. Yet Twelfth Night (V, i, 262, 280, ibid., pp. 877-78) uses the Icon “weed” with an Index of female apparel that was common in the oppositional system of Elizabethan English. Thus the first reference to the “rank weed” does not create an epochal gap. Rather, the image may become enhanced in significance at the level of the presenting strata, considering how many wastrels, such as the “weed” image elicits here, still populate the world today. However, the sense of apparel cannot be extracted from this Icon today. A modern Recipient returns to that earlier Index, since the “plant” Index does not befit the Icon either in this context. The wide epochal gap is then properly observed instead of being artificially narrowed, releasing accordingly what Shakespeare “meant” to say through the Icon. Otherwise the double-intentionality comprising reference and transference for the correlate becomes subverted at nominal-verbal interlocking: Referent selection (I) of explicit (M) content is then distorted at the implicit level (0).

That is to say, the indigenous pointer, the direction-factor of the material and formal contents marking “weed” and “attire” differed for Elizabethan English. The Index “attire” cannot be foregrounded into “weed” without drawing the blanks of my previous “pen” and “feather” examples. If not realized, the difference conflicts with the authorial intent and inadvertently changes a Recipient into a pseudo Referent; the “super “prefix has then been relinquished and/or replaced with a “pseudo “qualifier for this “reader.” Either Dicentic plot formation or Rhemic compounding will then suffer at the higher literary strata. Briefly, in Twelfth Night a character named Viola has donned male apparel; at this cited point in the plot, she decides to reappear in her female “weeds,” her womanly garb, whereupon the comedy reaches its happy, romantic denouement of reunited couples. Skimpy as my construal is, it makes the point of superreader obligation rather than option. An added solution may be supplied by the scholar of literature (as Harrison in my edition) who mediates somewhat artificially between Referent and Recipient through text-critical amendments.

This vital distinction between epochal option and obligation also surfaces somewhat confusedly in Validity of Interpretation by Hirsch (1967, pp. 215-216), where one may wonder at the “validity” of the critic’s solution. Hirsch discusses the image “vegetable love” used by the Metaphysical poet Marvell (1621-1678), certainly a closer contemporary to Shakespeare than to Hirsch, which may be part of the problem. Hirsch (who supports the findings of Wellek in this context) may be right in suggesting that the same attributive today would have been “vegetative,” with the connotations my own modern readers here would recognize. However, the linguistic change of import in itself cannot provide “enrichment” for the poem, as Hirsch claims, since this Icon must be read with the Index given by this poet. Yet Hirsch proposes that the only way out of what he views as a dilemma “is to perceive that the meaning of a text does not change and that the modern, different connotation of a word like ‘vegetable’ belongs, if it is to be entertained at all, to the constantly changing significance of the text” (ibid.).

Obviously, clear cut distinctions, of the kind I have separated as set “diachronic” levels for the linguistic strata and dynamic “synchronic” alternatives for the literary strata, are lacking. The former, just because they are in flux, should not be touched once they have become teleologically fused to a work at inception, hence at one point in time. Otherwise, a pseudo-authorship is again forced upon a work, marring the selectional bias of a correlate. Only once that linguistic foundation has been kept may the higher literary strata benefit from semantic enrichment in some changing significance-if romantic vegetation, perhaps, were of special concern today. Otherwise the “literary interpretations” would be robbed of their intrinsic “objectivity” (Juhl, 1975, pp. 385 ff).

One example worth adding also involves a female, if neither in reference to an “Ms.” address nor a “weed” attire. The German Icon “Frauenzimmer” used to denote “woman” but nowadays bears an invective closer to “bitch.” To read those negative connotations into one of Goethe’s novels, for instance, would grossly distort the Indexical relevance since, obviously, it was not “meant” and did not even exist for this Icon extant at the time of inception. No enrichment can result from such a linguistic distortion at the presenting strata either. The work would be encumbered by an unindented Index and the female it portrays by an unintended aspect, causing the quasi-mirror to go awry by subverting the authorial will. An epochal span thus narrowed falsifies the work just because no attempt has been made to “narrow” construal with the composition at the time of inception and the inventory on which the encoding then relied.

A superreader who relinquishes the “super “prefix through this negligence of lexical historicity commits an anachronism-perhaps more severe than the one Baumgärtner cited from Jakobson. No perceptive Recipient should be that unconversant with a linguistic medium and succeed at literary interpretation. Through epochal time, Referent and Recipient are brought “back” together in curious ways. Careful balancing is then needed between the true linguistic retrospect and enhanced literary prospect if the work is to benefit from a valid contemporaneousness in its “presence” as well as future postponement of concretization. The German philosopher Hartmann (1953, p. 166) describes how the continued existence (Fortbestehen) of a work produces a “going-forward” while recipience necessitates also a “refinding” along with a “reawakening” (German “Wiederfindbar-und Wiedererweckbarsein”).

Epochal time thus embodies a type of periodization despite the zero-point origin of non-adequated structures. The higher strata may undergo their own periodization through the cyclical popularity noted, hence of decline and comeback: the work reenters eras when the cultural climate is favorable to the author or theme, and disappears again when the opposite applies. Even Shakespeare, however mildly, was subjected to such cyclical unevenness. Brief pockets of decline appear to have occurred mainly during the eras of French and British neo-Classicism in the seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, partly expressed in objections to Shakespeare’s less than streamlined style, although today his contemporaneousness seems assured enough to proceed on a linear course. By sheer definition, the epochal time factor not only plays an important part in coming to terms with metaphorical deviance in language which the tradition plies, but may also disband those embattled “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” factions of literary criticism (Lohner, 1968). One-sided extrinsic or intrinsic “methods” (Hirsch, 1976, pp. 115 ff.) in their simplistic dogmatism may then be shelved for good.

The next temporal criterion is what I term Iconic time. As indicated, time here becomes mirrored in Icons, perhaps by deictic adverbs or the morphemic additions of verbs for tense changes. Iconic time thus covers lexical taxonomy of content which, when part of a pure referent, remains heteronomous, pure intentional in essence, radiating imagery as quasi-mirror or lyric foregrounding. Any “succession” here stays locked into the centrifugal Icons in their semiotic stretch and horizontal sequence. Logically, therefore, Iconic time consists solely of synchronic oppositional states constituting one linguistic inventory. Iconic time is selected for inclusion in the linguistic strata and localizes “time” within a non-adequated setting, Dicentic or Rhemic, as was indicated with the Hamlet example.

A German critic, Gabriel, illustrates my last point in a work devoted to “fiction and truth” (1975, pp. 14 ff.). Citing the sentence, “Yesterday was New Year,” Gabriel rightly observes that this statement, when true, could be made only on January 2. In non-Aristotelian terms, it could be true only when adequated with a reality-nexus under the structure of Argument, where such vertical temporality as the real New Year of experience enters through an objective referent. For all these reasons, then, the following and seemingly ungrammatical concoction may surface in a non-adequated use: “Tomorrow was Christmas.” Käte Hamburger (1968, pp. 65-66; 1973, pp. 72-73) actually extracted this sentence from a novel. Her reason for doing so was to prove quite convincingly that the “epic preterite” (“was”) had turned “epic” indeed, less by signifying the past than by providing a literary substratum for fiction. Because the tense has been superseded, the adverb denoting future may combine with this past tense, no matter how weird that sounds out of context. Another critic who examined the preterite was Barthes. Though obsolete in spoken French, the preterite is to him the “cornerstone of Narration,” capable of affirming the “presence of Art” through a “ritual of letters” which becomes an “ideal instrument of every construction of a world . . ”(thus capitalized, in Hawkes, 1977, p. 109).

A “ritual of words,” one might say, has begun at zero-point when the language is literary; a Kantian type “game” or “play” I called it before that wreaks havoc with time or space in a purposive sphere. Critics such as Gabriel (ibid., p. 29) nevertheless suggest that, ontologically, fictional bounds of time may be “liberalized” on occasion by letting a sliver of genuine history into the literary domain. To be sure, sometimes it seems that way, in the type of documentary drama, for example, which Gabriel cites as proof: Hochhuth’s play. The Deputy (1974, trans. 1978), covers the role of Pope Pius XII during World War II. To do that convincingly, historical facts are not only included in something resembling stage directions but follow in an added section called “Sidelights on History.” I cite this example primarily to stress that only the Sidelights outside of the drama, but not the supposed “facts” inside of it, bear real time.

Even experimental antiart tries to combat Iconic time. A case in point are the “speak-ins” (Sprechstücke) by the Austrian Handke (1974, p. 15). As their name suggests, they are types of spoken “happenings”: speakers instead of dramatic characters challenge the audience to synchronize their watches with stage time-a nice modern try at the traditional (Aristotelian) unity of time! Granted, no dramatic quasi-mirror arises from sheer speaking. The time thus appears monolithic. But straining for historical time that way remains histrionic after all. Time cannot straddle the audience arena and the artifice of set performances. Since these speakers are only mouthpieces of their author, they have not shed their “roles” entirely. Ontologically, there is no way to circumvent such distinctions between art and life, illusionary and real time.

Finally, there is structural time, which in essence has been a part of this analysis ever since the two constructs were individually identified. Thus, Dicentic continuity induced by the concatenating correlates opposes Rhemic simultaneity of what amounts to one correlate which burgeons into poetic intext. Dicent in fictional progression achieves constitution by indirect means, since a correlate is amalgamated first and then concatenated; Rheme partakes of a direct mode of constitution that befits its unique concrescence, to the point of countering progressive word order sequence with a regressive vertical coherence that was designated recursiveness before. The horizontal sequence goes forward while recursiveness forges vertical associations in a backward direction--“up” to a title if included.

This is where Ingarden’s Cognition (1968, p. 274) also has a valuable contribution to make in quite a lengthy description of the “lyric subject”: it constitutes a pure-intentional object that suffuses the full content of a poem (Gedicht), dominating even overt sentences, through an “expressive function” (Ausdrucksfunktion). In the same work, Ingarden speaks of a “condensation” (pp. 101-102, 283-284, 287) and “total immersion” (Versunkenheit, das völlige Sich-Versenken, pp. 137-139) as unique lyric qualities. He also offers an equivalent to my Rhemic recursiveness called by him a “Wiederkehren” (p. 105). In more figurative phrasing, lyric simultaneity is said to resemble the “present” (Gegenwart) in “a now” (Jetzt) phase, a contemporaneous moment (Gegenwarts-Moment) with close to “supra-temporal” (überzeitlich) dimensions (pp. 137, 139, 283-284).

Ingarden is thus aware of lyric “density” or “intensification”--meanings still caught in the German word for poetry, “Dichtung.” A superreader honors that difference through a mnemonic faculty of qualitative time Ingarden calls live memory (lebendiges Gedächtnis, pp. 101-103, 143-146). Its function is to foster what he terms “Retention und Potention,” words which hardly need translating (p. 143). My textual analyses demonstrate best how live memory works. At this point, let me affirm that it becomes the assimilating tool for the reconstruction or reconstitution (à la Riffaterre) of the connotative compounding that forms a poetic intext. Live memory is a capacity that serves the very “potency” of Rhemic width--long enough to retain the backgrounded content for lyric condensation. This faculty aids the concretization of the extended Rhemic transference; it allows functional metaphors as objects of expression to become construed holistically in forging the lyric ego, as the totality of expression takes root within the consciousness of a Recipient.

Fictional augmentation, on the other hand, undergoes a curious binary divergence during concretization that Ingarden calls double horizon (ibid., pp. 105, 140). In lyric poetry such a horizon stays “empty” (leer), he adds, meaning it has no chance to form. As indicated with the structural idiosyncrasies of the genres, the very length of Dicent necessitates stoppage in concretization, often spread out over several days. Dicentic assimilation is more localized and the concretization accordingly more gradual; it may be disrupted at various stages of the augmentation. Indeed no superreader possesses an attention span capable of covering a long novel in a single reading. What happens is that parts of the text are knit together and disclose features of the characters in their activities, while the ongoing concretization has not yet reached the same stage of amalgamation. Moreover, Dicent basically creates a double horizon because each concatenating correlate needs separate construal before some portrayal can be combined in further augmentation from the parts decoded.

Horizons, of course, have long been of interest in literary criticism. Gadamer, whose studies on hermeneutics (1960, specifically pp. 373-375) are widely known in one of his essays (1975, p. 117) describes the movement of a horizon: a Recipient “wanders into” a text which in turn “wanders along with” the recipience. This Gadamer essay is contained in a collaborative volume with the self-explanatory title of Rezeptionsästhetik (1975); an excerpt from Ingarden’s Cognition sets the tone; other critics (such as Jauss, pp. 131, 133-140) are shown to work also with horizons in their impact on recipience. (Also see Hirsch on Gadamer’s horizons, 1967, pp. 245, 252-253). Basically, to be sure, horizons cannot be eradicated from any concretizing process through the very continuum of the word order sequence, even in construal of the simultaneity characterizing the Rheme. But Ingarden introduced live memory as the faculty for the lyric genre precisely because immanent retention matters, rather than a gradual knitting together of parts through separate acts of consciousness, and thus the double horizon is blocked from forming.

Full superreader compliance with these structural intricacies of time, however, is best met with the three modes of reading Riffaterre advocated in his recent work on the semiotics of poetry (1978, p. 5): a “heuristic” reading aids a preliminary familiarity with the theme through textual synchronization; a “retroactive” reading then develops perspectives that affect the beginning in relation to the end, particularly when lyric recursiveness is involved in all its vertical alignments; a “hermeneutic” reading aims at the organic whole residing in both structures, even if arrived at differently in Dicent and Rheme. These triadic modes of concretization may be aligned to semiotic generation, from the first M-synchronization of decoding textual material to the full 0-processing of mnemonic time phases until an I-synthesis is obtained as an atemporal whole, be this a simulated fictional world of quasi-judgments or a totality of poetic expression. Lighter works such as thrillers may then trade more on the first type of reading and complex ones on the last.

Ingarden’s Cognition cites also the reinforcing aspects and indeterminate pockets that reside within the schematic material contents (pp. 49-59 ff.). Both came up in discussing the constructs. Obviously, the reinforcing aspect leave their impact on the Recipient from the first heuristic reading on, while the schematic pockets get a chance to fill out, especially the structural metaphors which burgeon in all their connotative circumference, during the hermeneutic reading. A by product of the hermeneutic reading is the harmonious interaction among the four strata that Ingarden calls consistently “polyphony” (1965, pp. 61, 397; 1968, pp. 93, 234, 284; Fieguth, pp. XLI, 24, 94).

So far stance has remained uniform, because it was largely discussed in conjunction with basic contextual controls of time. However, stance as superreader posture may be divided into roles that separate the critic from the connoisseur. The nomenclature is my own, but Ingarden (1968, pp. 233-234, 246-249, 264, 425) suggests this dichotomy in his Cognition, where he differentiates the “artistic”(künstlerisch) from the “esthetic” (ästhetisch) “values” that inhere in a literary work of art. The artistic values govern the construct in what might be called the “inlaid” compositional areas; the esthetic values take effect in the appeal of the work during concretization and thus affect the sensibilities of the decoding consciousness. In the etymology of “esthetic” from Greek “aistheysis” (my transliteration), the term signified sensuous appeal (Fobes, 1966, p. 266).

Basically, therefore, these values split into Referent and Recipient priorities. The esthetic values induce that very vibrance of experience during concretization that caused Ingarden to speak of “life.” Fundamentally, to be sure, the Referent predicts these effects in the selection of contents, but their appreciation emerges with the concretizing process when proper superreader response actualizes the esthetic values. For dealing with the artistic values, Ingarden reserves the analytic or “pre-esthetic” stance of cool observation (Betrachtung, pp. 248, 272, 284, 286-289). Instead of yielding to the sheer continuum of concretization in its full esthetic actualization, the analyst coolly appraises the compositional merits of a work. Unavoidably, this analytic stance causes a type of “vivisection,” whose negative effects Ingarden makes explicit with such terms as “zerschlagen,” “Zersetzung,” and even “Verletzung” (ibid.) The German prefixes “zer-”/“ver “bear pejorative connotations of disintegration, fragmentation, or diffraction, and these effects are a necessary evil of strenuous concentration on isolated detail. To mitigate that problem, the esthetic stance of the connoisseur takes over from the pre-esthetic stance of the critic and becomes immersed in a last hermeneutic and polyphonous concretization that once more cements the work in its ultimate if stratified coherence.

The superreader stance discussed so far reacts to the controls of a construct. However, what happens if the controls appear to conflict? To make sure they are not taken for granted, I introduce second stance, whose role is proper authentication. The number does not imply “secondary,” since this stance is as crucial as what will now be differentiated as “primary” stance in designating all the aforesaid aspects. Rather, “second” signifies only that this stance is not always consciously invoked when no problem of authentication exists. Second stance prevents what might be termed figuratively an “identity crisis” of the two constructs, at times even involving Argument. Context, with all the contacts previously specified, possesses many safeguards against structural subversion, not to mention that the structures were all grounded in units natural to language. Even a less literate but mature speaker has become innately aware of differences between ostensive-everyday use and “fictional” storytelling or “lyric” mnemonics in rhymed formations.

Outside of such Recipient awareness, the inbuilt Referent as authorial will induces barriers between structures. Limitations of length certainly exist for Dicent and Rheme if in diametrically opposed ways: no genuine mimetic augmentation can be confined to a couple of correlates, and no Rhemic immediacy in conjunction with live memory could grapple with the length of the majority of novels, even dramas. Also, prose cannot obtain for the Rheme even if verse is not confined to the Rheme as stated. So there is some recursiveness in versified dramas, too, as lines make vertical contact for the benefit of rhyme or whatever. Still, superreader stance follows the guidelines of Dicent since the formation of a plot drives the text forward in Dicentic augmentation. The same applies to a Homeric type of versified epic; it still “tells” a story and is thus Dicent. This point should be noted early, since Aristotle will be shown in the adjunct to rely heavily on these works for his dubious “metaphor.” The versified ballad, like the Homeric epic, partakes of mimetic augmentation in non-Aristotelian semantics; a “story” is being told, involving figures and their activities that must be knit together in smaller, syntactic correlates, even if these are broken up by lines through such poetic accouterments as rhythm and rhyme.

Käte Hamburger (1968, pp. 233 ff., 240) considers the ballad a borderline case. Non Aristotelian semantics, while not positing many structures, eschews hybrids: either a work is intended for mimetic augmentation or for lyric expression. Ultimately, there is Argument, too, in the possible form of a versified commercial. Thus the billboard poster may bear verse. But the very contact Argument makes with the extralinguistic reality necessitates everyday authentication as the units become perforated in the manner explained. Actually, my interest is not so much in providing an exhaustive list of examples where formats seem at odds with their essence but rather to deal with the problem of authentication itself.

Ingarden’s Cognition pp. 232-233 ff.) hints at second stance, where he refers to an “attitude” or “Einstellung” that is mandatory when the title of a text “informs” recipients as to the presence of a poem, drama, or whatever. Part of that information, of course, becomes relayed to that innate awareness of linguistic competence, which may be called “literary competence,” a term used by Sacks (1968, p. 110). The latter suggests that there must be “certain formal ends . . . known in advance by any reader capable of reading a comedy as comedy, or, indeed, by any writer capable of writing one.” Sacks unfortunately does not define those ends. Each work harbors “intrinsic imperatives” (Hirsch, 1976, p. 115), and concretization meets these.

The human capacities and textual imperatives embody respectively the modals “can” and “should.” Nothing prevents readers from making a versified commercial out of a poem or vice versa. But Recipients then violate the imperatives of the work albeit possessing the power to do otherwise. To obviate such perversion of an authorial will, I introduce the esthetic ought in cognizance of Kant. His Third Critique cites it in conjunction with the “Fourth Moment,” that of “modality,” which governs the esthetic judgment (Urteilskraft) of taste after the moments of quality, quantity, and relation (Cassirer ed., V, 1914, section 18, pp. 307-308). Kant used for the esthetic ought the same modal--”sollen”-that formulated his famous ethical maxim, the categorical imperative in the Second Critique (ibid., p. 35). The indication is that where the human will is in control it should aspire to doing what it can (können) achieve. Whatever the differences between ethics and esthetics, there is that related volitional base, although entirely spontaneous in goal for purposive wholes that rest in their own autotelism.

That language is basically “coercive” my study proved from the very start. With the esthetic ought, that coerciveness preserves the distinction between literal and literary alternatives, and for that matter also between fictional and lyric dispositions. Let me provide a few examples. Since the early “lyric” mnemonics of nursery rhymes were mentioned, I cite from the famous T. S. Eliot poem, The Waste Land, because this is what one of its lines (1971, p. 146) contains: “London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down. “Out of context, the words are part of the nursery rhyme. In context, this atavistic vestige, with its monotonous repetition (bereft of all punctuation), has become poeticised. As an integral component of the “Waste Land,” it supports the theme rendering a desiccated society that is close to “falling down.”

Again, my interpretation may suffice only to make the point that this nursery rhyme is no longer the game of children but a part of the esthetic “game” which has Icons render a serious theme through juvenile imagery. The line was chosen also for the geographical reference that so confused Searle. Whether plain “London” or “London Bridge,” the British landmark and its city are not meant directly but belong instead to the nursery rhyme which in turn fosters the significance already explored. This geographical vestige, then, is in reference as remote from the stone or pavement of the real thing as it would be if it were composed of canvas on a painting; its Index of decay supersedes pointing to that actual place in Britain’s, capital city, whether or not the real bridge is in good shape. A superreader knows all that when heeding the esthetic ought through authentication of the Rheme. Then Icons are probed for their foregrounding until their relevant Indexes interlock in satisfactory backgrounding to convey the desolate societal landscape that goes right back “up” to the title. Involved are structural metaphors that contribute through their explicit and implicit denominations to the whole, whether deviant or standardized in appearance. A poetic intext has thus enveloped this nursery rhyme, inclusive of its “London Bridge.”

Curiously, an entire poem may be additionally enveloped by fiction. The nineteenth-century penchant of (German) Romantic novelists, for instance, was to include whole poems in novels. Since non-Aristotelian semantics has ruled out hybrids, what obtains here? The answer is--Dicent. Surprisingly, length dominates in structure: the poems are surrounded by mimetic augmentation since those who recite them will be fictional characters. Put the other way, these poems characterize some figure. Should the poems be severed from their Dicentic environment and be read by themselves, particularly with an author’s endorsement, the esthetic ought ordains concretization of the Rheme with the agency of live memory.

Another example for seemingly crossing structural bounds between Rheme and Argument is offered by Käte Hamburger (1968, 191-197; trans. 1973, pp. 237-246). It involves a devotional cycle by the Romantic poet Novalis which was at times read either as poem or as prayer in church. Hamburger notes rightly that the two are intrinsically no longer the same thing. Without an author’s consent, the prayer remains a subversion of the authorial will, the poet’s act of meaning. But even with his consent the poem now serves real speakers in reference to ulterior pragmatic goals, no matter how deserving these are, and the very term “ulterior” came up with (Peirce’s) Argument. That, indeed, is where the prayer belongs; the focus is no longer on a pure but an objective referent and justice cannot be done to lyric foregrounding and backgrounding. For functional entities like meanings, the essence, now perforated as described with adequation, changes accordingly. Structurally then, this poem has become “literal” instead of literary, leaving the term “poem” essentially a misnomer. Put another way, these words have relinquished the esthetic ought.

Even this example was chosen for more than one reason. It forestalls Aristotle’s problem with the prayer which, in its effusive eloquence, he has pitted against the theoretical proposition. Non-Aristotelian semantics keeps both these uses under one structural qualifier insofar as they necessitate adequation, whether the objective referent is utilitarian or logical-theoretical, for reasons explained earlier. Unfortunately there is no room here to enter into the controversies surrounding biblical language which my comments on the prayer may have unleashed. Let me say only that a document of this nature cannot be a blanket case of non-adequated language, even if “poetic” vestiges such as the Song of Solomon seem to merit outwardly such a classification.

A convenient signal in accommodation of the esthetic ought would seem to be a title or subtitle specifying the genre. But often titles render little more than what Wimsatt (1967, p. 51) has termed “superficially inspectable shapes.” Indeed such information may entail a histrionic type of “proffering” on the part of authors who are less intent on verifying a genre than on finding fancy terms for describing their works. Sometimes the intent may be deliberate enough to delude or tease Recipients. Not that this is a judgmental observation of such practices; the author’s right is not challenged, only a superreader’s acuity to reach the genuine Referent during concretization, especially when functioning in that analytic stance of the critic rather than the average connoisseur.

Goethe’s Faust, for example, was proffered as “A Tragedy” without actually being a drama. The subtitle mainly underscores the theme of human striving against the metaphysical odds and thus does not touch any functional depth of contextualization. This work also has been classed loosely as a “dramatic poem” or “poetic drama,” where the critics following Goethe leaned on sheer descriptive epithets, which is less acceptable. Indeed, the identification of tragedy would not affect non-Aristotelian structures, since Dicent covers it anyway as mimetic augmentation, despite the rich poetic texture. Whatever the case, a superreader authenticates this structure as Dicent. And, certainly, while the work is too long to be held in live memory, the fate of Faust spells “plot.” In addition, the Handke speak-ins, although “true” to the role of speakers, become a type of histrionic proffering by suggesting through the title that Recipients get real speakers-under Argument.

Whatever Recipients get, the esthetic ought does not extend to the lexical phenomena the Russian Formalists term “deautomatized” and/or “defamiliarized” constituents (from Russian “ostranenie”; Lohner, 1968, pp. 152-159; Hawkes, 1977, pp. 62-63, 66, 69; Stankiewicz, 1974, pp. 629 ff.; Bruns, 1975, pp. 71-81). Such an overt alienation may be loosely histrionic as well. Rather, in authenticating the structure and, with it, the underlying function, the content involved becomes ipso facto deautomatized to meet the tasks set for the pure referents of Dicent or Rheme. The Eliot poem with the nursery-rhyme line, in fact, abounds with British slang, or Cockney. The Rheme nevertheless deautomatizes that lingo as significant import of the dreary mindlessness this elitist poet attributes to the lower classes and uses here to render the atavistic desiccation from yet another Iconic perspective. Moreover, an epochal discrepancy may arise here, if future Recipients have lost that Cockney inventory and impose other connotations on that type of English.

The esthetic ought is thus not to be misled by the lexicon or titular descriptions and the like; it cannot be “misread” because through all that diversity the structure stays identical. That traditional genre determinations did not overlook time and stance either will be indicated next with a highly selective historical survey of trends that may clarify further issues related to my own theory. Recent experts on developments in genre determination (Ruttkowski, 1968, pp. 34-37; Hempfer, 1973, pp. 169-170) cite the various concerns with time in a truly impressive listing of international exponents: among others, they name Humboldt, Paul, Schelling, and for today, Jakobson, Hirt, Kleiner, Erskin, Dallas, Frye, Staiger, and Kayser.

Wading through these theories may be rewarding but not to the point of discovering analyses that deal with bounds on a level of semantic function. All too often the methods resemble those of the neo-Aristotelian approaches to metaphor by seizing on conspicuous surface phenomena. Most critics class lyric poetry in present time, rendered by a first-person lyric “I” that conveys self-expression through a “subject,” epic prose in the past as preterite third-person narration geared to an “object,” and drama in the future as potential enactment of a dialogical make-up, hence the second person. My synopsis may well by-pass facets of individual theories but none were pertinent enough for my structural focus. With the limited space here, I select the last three names, Frye, Staiger, and Kayser to briefly detail theories that touch on issues I have treated

In the case of Frye, more remarkable than his analysis is his acclaim, if for no other reason than that his much cited Anatomy of Criticism (1967) lacks any coherence among the four autonomous essays that were simply reprinted under one title (Daiches, in Hempfer, 1973, pp. 76-77). Frye’s fourth essay treats rhythmic temporality through an alleged “Theory of Genres” (ibid., pp. 243-337). While it may be nice to describe “epos,” “prose,” and “lyric” as rhythmic “recurrence,”“continuity,” and “association” respectively, matters are not helped if “prose” or “poetry” as opposed to the “lyric,” for instance, is never properly defined. Frye’s flair lies in what might be labeled the “critical epithet.” Original and irreverent, his epithets tag free verse as “emancipated lyrical rhythm,” modern poetry as “centripetal wordmagic,” and Greek melos and opsis of sonorous and visual Qualisign dimensions as “babble” and “doodle”--synonyms also with “splutters” and “sparks” (ibid., pp. 273, 275-278). This diverting profusion, however, lapses into uncritical confusion for the lack of a systematic presentation in nomenclature.

The other two critics, Staiger and Kayser, are selected for their relevance to the issues of number and stance. However, with the limited space at my disposal, I arrive at their theory by indirect means, putting the issues before the people. Number is relevant insofar as my binary genre determination breaks with the traditional triad (Hempfer, 1973, pp. 148 ff.; Ruttkowski, 1968, pp. 26 ff.). By the nineteenth century that triad even became linked to (Hegelian) dialectics: Vise her, for instance, reserved “thesis” for the lyric, “antithesis” for the epic, and “synthesis” for the dramatic genre (Ruttkowski, p. 35). Early in this century, Peterson (1926; Ruttkowski, pp. 35, 133) used the criteria of monologue and dialogue for his own triad by linking a monological report with “Epos,” a dialogical presentation with drama, and a vague “monological presentation of a condition” with the lyric kind that lacked a plot.

Of these distinctions, it is the monological factor that led to some curious ramifications and will take me back to number and stance. At issue is the German concept “Artistik.” The German poet-critic Benn (1965, pp. 500-502) took the term from Nietzsche and had it signify pure “monological” artifice in poetry, which is to say that this type of language is aimed exclusively at the muse instead of a dialogical addressee (Gumpel, 1976, pp. 125-127, 141, ff.). Thus interpreted, “Artistik” connotes something that resembles a lack of adequation for literary use. Moreover, number got involved with this concept when Ruttkowski (ibid., pp. 86-104) confusedly plied the term “Artistik” as a label for a fourth genre that was to “modify” the triad of “fundamental poetics.” His term, however, looked to performance embodied in the circus “artiste.” The concept was thus hardly the same: “Artistik” as fourth genre shed its monological roots to become a dialogical or “audience-related” (pubiikumsbezogen) phenomenon.

Although one may have hoped for another term, any nomenclature is valid when properly defined. And “audience-relation” certainly abounds today. The Handke speak ins were one instance of addressing the audience on the time factor quoted. One speak in actually “offends” the audience by hurling invectives at it in an “audience-related” attempt. An earlier didactic rather than experimental goal caused authors like Brecht to posit an audience-related, anti-illusionary theater aimed at breaking through the theatrical illusion in order to keep spectators sufficiently “alienated” from the plot that they would learn from it rather than emotionally identify with it. Stylistically, his plot-alienation is a curious way of “defamiliarizing” drama (in the Russian Formalist “Priem Ostranennija,” as suggested by Willett 1964, pp. 179-180).

However, no matter how “pure” or “engaged” the motives of the authors, their method ultimately remains what I called “histrionic” before. Stage and arena belong to two separate realities; the inbuilt “audience” of the former is no ontological clone of the latter. Ruttkowski’s fourth audience-related category thus distinguishes nothing the traditional triad could not include. But his ill-founded numeric extension is worth mentioning because he (1968, pp. 47 ff.) posited it as the self-professed heir of the poetics that had revolved around “fundamental stances,” in German “Grundhaltungen.” This Teutonic interest essentially harks back to Goethe, specifically his “natural forms” (Naturformen) discussed with prefatory comments to his poetic cycle of 1819, the Westöstlicher Divan (1965, II, pp. 187-189). Goethe contrasts the natural forms with the “poetic formats” (Dichtarten) comprising such historical genres as elegy, fable, ode, and so on. The natural forms oppose these diverse formats as three basic linguistic modes, couched in the nouns “Epos, Lyrik, Drama.” Yet his description of these nouns seems rather ambiguous, even affective: “lucid narration” goes with the “Epos,” while “enthusiastic excitement” and “acting persons” apply respectively to the other two.

So innate is the “natural” state of these forms that they appear in any format-just like the lexicon. This ubiquity is in itself an indication that their root is more anthropomorphic than constitutive, not resting in units whose bounds are truly “natural” to language. Yet this vulnerable omnipresence was passed on to contemporary Teutonic criticism, of which Staiger and Kayser are to be the representatives here (for Viëtor and Cysarz, see Hempfer, 1973, pp. 18-19, 63, 67-79). True, the terms were changed: “fundamental” or even “elemental” replaced the attributive “natural” with the prefix “Grund-”--obviously a cognate of “ground”--which then preceded “concept” or “stance” (Begriff, Haltung, or Einstellung).

Staiger, a Swiss German and no doubt the most prominent among this contingent (1959, pp. 236-237 ff.), also correlated fundamental stance with simple or “primary qualities.” To these he assigned the adjectives “lyrical, epical, dramatic” (offered occasionally in the substantive “das Lyrische,” and so on). Three nouns, “Lyrik, Epik, Drama,” then became the classificatory precepts (Sammelbegriffe) that resembled “slots” (Fächer) and as such could encapsulate the simple qualities. These slots impress one as shells or molds into which the qualities are poured, thus with none of that integral “molding” between content and context my study cited from Peirce while discussing the Interpretant. Here, stance would lose control over the essence of the constituents, since the “ground” is not indigenous to the whole.

Kayser (1963, pp. 330 387), generally a discerning critic, demonstrates that schism between content and functional context well enough when he (p. 335) insists, for example, that an exclamation such as “Ach!”, the German equivalent for “Oh!”, bears fundamentally a lyric stance. It just so happens that an early nineteenth-century play, Amphitryon, by H. v. Kleist (1964, pp. 245, 320), concludes with an enigmatic “Ach!” But no matter how eloquent its illocutionary force, the exclamation belongs to Dicent. Uttered by a fictional speaker, it becomes the last presented aspect to characterize that figure. There is no getting around that function. The same applies to another example Kayser cites in this context which, by coincidence, appeared in my study to illustrate double-intentionality. That is “Fire!” as exclamation (rather than command). Kayser (p. 335) states that it possesses illocutionary force-German “Kundgabe”--as well as a possible perlocutionary “release” (Auslösung) when resulting in the action of extinguishing the fire.

As explained with the aid of Ingarden, illocution and perlocution, too, are content, and thus subordinated to a structure that molds the vestige into everyday or esthetic (Dicentic or Rhemic) use. To be sure, any novel or poem may sound “lyrical” or “dramatic,” for instance, when eloquence predominates in one and dialogue in the other. Style may be thus described in literary scholarship. “Stance,” however, when thus interpreted merely yields to loose description instead of isolating a “natural” or “fundamental ‘ trait in literary works of art. As for Ruttkowski, the self-acclaimed heir of fundamental poetics, he would have done better by this tradition had he deanthropomorphized stance rather than modified it by what is qua language literally a “use-less” fourth division. Who is to arbitrate on the “audience-relation” or the “lyrical” bent of a drama or novel? The question becomes rhetorical.

The issue of number causes me to cite one more theory which tends in the opposite direction to Ruttkowski’s by reducing genre to two classes from the traditional three. Such a binary division would seem to parallel my own. In fact that same theory made me posit just two literary genres. But here is the difference: in all, I offer still three structures, one of them nonliterary. That addition, precisely, is omitted from Käte Hamburger’s Logic of Literature, as the English title (1973) reads for the last word, “Dichtung.” Hamburger goes by the Aristotelian concepts, “poein” and “legein,” signifying to “fashion” or “make,” and to “say” (1968, pp. 15-19, 187, passim). From these, she draws up two logical forms. The merit of her thesis is that, despite this Aristotelian influence, it stays “non-Aristotelian” in my understanding of the term by going for (logical) function instead of lexical appearances. The “logic,” however, suffers because her category of “saying” as “statement” comprises everyday and lyric use. The bounds between literal and lyric statements are accordingly left “open” in a fluid point of transition (ibid., pp. 11, 12, 187, 228, 269, 279-280, often citing Hegel in support).

Literal and lyric statements, claims Hamburger (1968, pp. 28-51, 187-205), require a “correlation” between a subject-pole and an object-pole; the more subjective end tends to the lyric and the objective to the literal. The arbitrary nature on which such a decision would have to be based ultimately forces Hamburger (1968, p. 215; 1973, p. 269) into contradictions. That is where she separates the lyric from the literal statement for possessing a “sense-nexus” instead of a “reality-nexus.” With the sense-nexus, the lyric statement has gone into total “recoil” toward the “subject pole,” while the literal statement remains suspended between object pole and subject pole (correlation), depending on how abstract or concrete its wording is (1968, pp. 41 ff.; 1973, pp. 40 ff.).

So a cutoff point exists after all, countering her premise of the “open” state. While this solution seems better, it cannot eliminate the inconsistency. Also, by implication Hamburger is then left with three alternatives. More effective are her ideas on the mimetic “l-Origines”-essentially fictional “originations” which confirm that works of fiction own no real speaking subjects, whether or not authors and narrators appear in the works (1968, pp. 62-68, 275, 279, passim). The same type of “closure,” however, must govern every use, and not least lyric expression. To cite from an essay by E. Stankiewicz (1974, p. 642),

Poetry delimits the beginning and the end of a work, creating poetic “closure,” or a frame which contains the work and sets it off from the “ordinary” language as an artifact which has itself as its purpose and context.

Hamburger’s conflict therefore substantiates that three in number is the bare minimum, if one use must be reserved for nonliterary purposes. The issue of “closure” that has now closed my analysis of Hamburger’s theory has other curious repercussions in Anglo-Saxon criticism. My study forestalled this problem by indicating that certain “extrinsic” factors do not disrupt the “intrinsic” essence of literary works once their provenance is understood. But this very dichotomy erupted into polemics within this century and began largely with reactions to positivism. It is said (Hempfer, 1973, pp. 9-10) that positivism late in the nineteenth century eluded the Germans due to the influence of Dilthey’s humanistic studies, the “Geisteswissenschaften,” while simultaneously some Anglo-Saxons put much effort into resisting this rising trend, particularly as espoused by Symonds and Brunetière. The so-called New Criticism of the early 1920s to 1930s was supposed to stem the tide of positivism, though not without some confused notions of affiliation. Apparently Ransom had advocated a “New Criticism” (while unaware of Spingarn’s forerunner) in the hope of moving away from the focus on detail adopted by Richards, Empson, and Winters. (Brooks, 1965, pp. 567-568; with Wimsatt, 1967, pp. 610-634, 635-656).

Yet ironically the persons cited themselves became known as the “New Critics,” with Frye, among others, thrown in for good measure. By the 1950s the New Critics came under attack by the Chicago School-known as the “neo-Aristotelian” group (Brian Lee, 1966, p. 39, and his reference to Burke). “Aristotelian” was supposed to be their attempt to emulate the father of genre, Aristotle, by seeking the holistic perspectives that the New Critics were accused of having neglected. In the compendious Critics and Criticism (1952, pp. 13, 556), one Chicagoan, Crane, endorses vague “wholes of various kinds,” and another, Olson, looks to some “composite continuum” based on a “perceptable magnitude.” The pagination for these quotes demonstrates that I jumped from the begining to the end, mainly because wading through the middle of this treatise offered no “perceptable” synthesis in any critical coherence. (See Wimsatt, 1967, pp. 41-65; Vivas, 1963, pp. 243 259; Scholes, 1974, pp. 80-81). In fact, the more interesting studies seemed to concentrate on the type of detail for which their adversaries, the New Critics, had been castigated.

Equally thwarted in their attempts at defining an intrinsic literary whole were “neo Aristotelians” in reference to my application of this term. Tacitly, at least, this contingent, surfacing in the last few decades, got caught in a Fregean crisis that kept adherents embroiled in a Contextualist Dilemma. Those involved-Krieger, Sutton, and Vivas-actually used the italicised terms while entering into the polemics of deciding as to who was a Contextualist and what, essentially, the label meant (Vivas, 1963, pp. 171-202; Sutton, 1958-1959; Krieger, 1962 1963).

In The New Apologists for Poetry (1956, pp. 20, 22), Krieger makes explicit the dilemma as he wonders how a poem can “function referentially” as it must in order to make sense while the language dare not “break the context” even as it is forced to “point outside itself.” How does poetic language stay “non-referential” as a “special form of discourse,” asks Krieger, when simultaneously it must be “referential to be any form of discourse at all.” He (pp. 88-89) offers a series of dichotomies supposedly separating the literal from the literay, which his precursors rendered as “tension” versus “intension” (Tate), “logic” versus “texture” (Ransom) and “motive” versus “emotion” (Winters). Then he observes:

And as we must ask of Winters’ “motive” or Ransom’s “logic,” we must ask of Tate’s “extension,” whether it desists from its prosaic function of denoting objects under the pressure from “tension” to create a unique and self-contained mode of discourse.

Well, Ingarden could have made these critics realize that their “motive,” “logic,” or “extension” is actually the reference which “desists” from natural denoting because it must break with that self-contained discourse the pure referent bears--first! In that all-pervading skepticism, language cannot be entrusted with “denoting” on its own ground. Exactly how well it does so, the ensuing textual analyses should prove conclusively for the three structures and the two holistic constructs in their concretization.