a level of possible semantic actualization of the text. Yet, in order to analyze that semantic property or indeed that level of meaning that a text manifests, it is necessary to specify more exactly what is meant by isotopy. My hypothesis is that the term, variously defined by Greimas and by his school, is an umbrella term, a rather general notion that can allow for various more specific ones defining different textual phenomena. Only the clarification of these differences will make it possible to throw light on the positive theoretical aspects of the notion.

Greimas defines isotopy as “a complex of manifold semantic categories making possible the uniform reading of a story” (1970:188). The category would then have the function of textual disambiguation,

I. For the convenience of the reader, I reproduce in this chapter the table of levels of textual cooperation published in The Role of the Reader (Eco 1979: 14). In the box on discursive structures, I did not sufficiently develop the voice ‘chosen of the isotopies’, since the concept of isotopy was there understood as used in Greimas* semiotics. As to the deeper intensional levels, in The Role of the Reader I developed only a few aspects of the question, since my major interest was in the interpretation of the narrative level (fabula) and in the extensional inferences (possible worlds).

but on various occasions Greimas furnishes examples dealing with sentences and outright noun phrases. For instance, in order to explain in what sense the amalgam on a single classeme (either semantic category or repeated contextual seme) makes possible a uniform reading, he gives the example of the two expressions le chien aboye (the dog barks) and le commissaire aboye (the commissioner barks). Given that bark has two classemes, human and canine, it is the presence of the dog or the com-missioner that reiterates one of the two that decides whether bark is taken in a literal or a figurative sense. It should be obvious that what are called classemes here are out contextual selections (see Eco 1976, 2.12.2). The human presence of the commissioner introduces a ‘human’ context and makes it possible to make the appropriate selection out of the com-positional spectrum of bark.2

But can we say that an isotopy obtains always and only under such conditions? Aside from the fact that, if so, it would not differ from nor-mal semantic coherence or from the notion of amalgamation, the lists made of the various meanings of the term by either Greimas or his dis-ciples (see Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1976) do say that at various times there are isotopies that are semantic, phonetic, prosodic, stylistic, enunciative, rhetorical, presuppositional, syntactic, or narrative. It is, therefore, fair to assume that isotopy has become an umbrella term covering diverse semiotic phenomena generically definable as coherence at the various tex-tual levels. (See Figure 6.1.) But is that coherence obtained at the var-ious textual levels by applying the same rules?

In the most recent developments of Greimas’ theory (see Greimas and Courtes 1979:197), there is a distinction between a first and a second stage of the theory of isotopies. The term isotopy designated d’abord, а phenomenon of semic iterativity throughout a syntagmatic chain; thus any syntagm (be it a phrase, a sentence, a sequence of sentences com-posing a narrative text) comprehending at least two content figurae (in Hjelmslev’s sense) is to be considered as the minimal contest for a pos-sible isotopy. In this first stage, the theory considered (a) syntactical isotopies; (b) semantic isotopies; (c) actorial isotopies; (d) partial isotopies of a text (or ‘isosémies’) that disappear when the smaller units of a text are summarized by macropropositions (Greimas calls this proc-ess “condensation”; see ibid., p. 58); (e) global isotopies, as the result of the final actualization of the isotopies listed in (d).
In a second stage of the theory, the concept has been broadened in its scope. It now designates not only the iterativity of classemes but also the

2. Cf. Greimas (1966:52-53). Cf. also Van Dijk, “Aspects d’une théorie generative du texte poétique” in Greimas, ed., Essais de s’emiotique poetique (Paris: Larousse, I972): “It can be said that the central isotopy of a text is made up of the lowest seme or classeme dominating the greatest number of lexemes of the text” (pp. 180— 206).

Isotopy

INTENSIONS

9. ELEMENTARY IDEOLOGICAL STRUCTURES
10. ACTANTIAL STRUCTURES

Actantial roles as manifested by actorial roles

6. NARRATIVE STRUCTURES

Macropropositions of the fabula

(themes, motives, narrative functions)

4. DISCURSIVE STRUCTURES

Individuation of topics

EXTENSIONS

10. WORLD STRUCTURES

World matrices Assignment of truth values Judgments of accessibility
among worlds Recognition of propositional
attitudes

7. FORECASTS AND INFERENTIAL WALKS

Fabula as temporal succession of world states
Probability disjunctions and inferences

5. (BRACKETED) EXTENSIONS

First uncommitted references to

Reduction of frames Blowing up and
narcotizing properties

Semantic a (possible) world disclosures

Isotopies

ACTUALIZED CONTENT

3. EXPRESSION
   Linear text manifestation
4. CODES AND SUBCODES

Basic dictionary
Rules of co-reference
Contextual and circumstancial selections Rhetorical and stylistical overcoding
Common frames lntertextual frames
Ideological overcoding

2. CIRCUMSTANCES OF UTTERANCE

Information about the sender, time and social context of the message, suppositions about the
nature of the speech act, etc.

FIGURE 6.I

recurrence of thematic categories. Different figurative isotopies (semic recurrence) can concern the actualization of a unique thematic isotopy as it happens in the cases of biblical parables, where minor facts must be read as meaning the same major theme. I think that a satisfactory example of this phenomenon is provided here by the text analyzed in 6.1.6. Greimas gives the example of Mallarmé’s “Salut” (Greimas and Rastier 1968), where many figurative isotopies such as banquet, naviga-tion, and writing express at an upper level thematic isotopies such as friendship, solitude/escape, and poetic creativity.

In this second stage, Greimas and Courtés (1979) also mention more complex isotopies taking place through strategies of ‘verification’ and processes of ‘modalization’. Greimas himself speaks of possible worlds, and I think that these isotopies concern the outlining of possible epistemic worlds where the Constance of a given reading level can be established only by the deci-sion of dealing with individuals belonging to the same possible world, without referring the same name or the same definite description to two different individuals belonging to two mutually inaccessible worlds. Similar cases can be found here in 6.1.3. and will be discussed in 6.1.8. In the same vein can be read the phenomena of textual ambiguity (or of pluri-isotopicity) at the extensional level, studied in Eco 1979, apropos of Allais’ “Un drame bien parisien.”

Greimas has further stressed the possibility of conceiving of texts able to provide manifold and mutually contradictory isotopic interpretations (without, however, supporting the assumption that a text can have infinite readings).

Finally, Greimas has admitted that the isotopies can take place also at the expression-plane, by accepting a minimal definition (suggested by Rastier) according to which isotopy is the iterativity of linguistic units, be it manifested or not at the expression-plane, belonging to both ex-pression and content. However, he admits that such a broad formulation can be rather confusing. As a matter of fact, it comes to cover too many phenomena, as, for instance, cases of rhetorical metaplasms (see Groupe μ 1970) such as alliteration, which do not request —in order to be explained — the complex paraphernalia of a theory of isotopies.

That is why it seems advisable to make the term isotopy less equivocal, stipulating the minimal conditions for its use. Perhaps the first step in this direction (such is the aim of the present chapter) is not so much to find out a definitive definition as to distinguish different meanings of the concept.
The diagram in Figure 6.2 does not aim at establishing a complete isotopic system but at showing that the category can assume various forms, according to the representation of the levels of actualization of a text outlined in Figure 6.1.

discursive isotopies

INTENSIONS

narrative
isotopies

within sentences

between sentences

connected with discursive isotopic disjunctions

unconnected with discursive isotopic disjunctions

with paradigmatic disjunction
with syntagmatic disjunction
with paradigmatic disjunction
with syntagmatic disjunction
exclusive
complementary

EXTENSIONS — extensional isotopies concerning possible worlds

FIGURE 6.2

6.1. Discursive isotopies within sentences with paradigmatic disjunction

In his essay on crossword puzzles, Greimas (1970) examines this defini-tion with its definiendum:

(1) L’ ami des simples = herbalist

in which the clever definition arises from the fact that /simples/ has two contextual selections, one common (context ‘human’) and one special-ized (context ‘vegetal’). Only after it is decided that the term is under-stood in the second sense is it established that it counts as a substantive, not an adjective, and therefore it is decided to decode /ami/ as «lover» or «fan» and not as «friend». The topic has intervened as a reading hypothesis (speaking of plants and not of ethical attitudes), has pointed toward the appropriate contextual selection and has imposed a rule of interpretive coherence affecting all the lexemes involved. We can apply the term isotopy to the semantic result of that coherent interpretation and recognize the actualized isotopy as the ‘objective’ content of the expression (objective in the sense that it is supported by the code.

Natu-rally in the case of this expression, which is deliberately ambiguous, or, if we like, bi-isotopic, the objective contents are two, both actualizable). It should be noted, too, that in this case the isotopy does not depend on any redundance of semantic type, since ami and simples do not seem to have semes in common. In truth, the final isotopy is realized by the whole syntagm, question + solution: the herbalist is the friend of /sim pies/. That is to say, that once the topic has been isolated (that is, once assumed that the subject is plants), we get the sentence The herbalist likes herbs, in which the presence of the botanist imposes a vegetal seme which makes it possible to actualize the appropriate contextual selection within the componential spectrum of «simples». Cases of the same kind are demonstrated in those puzzles called ‘mnemonic cryptographs’ studied extensively