The Sememe as a Virtual Text

"A sememe is in itself an inchoative text whereas a text is an expanded sememe". (Lector in Fabula 1979: 27; The Role of the Reader, 1979: 175). First found in Lector in fabula (1979a: 27) and The Role of the Reader (1979b: 175) the quote is foreshadowed in A Theory of Semiotics (1976), in reference to the Encyclopaedic expansions of a sememe within the so-called Q-Model. It reappears in its fully-fledged form in The Limits of Interpretation (1990: chapter 14 on Presuppositions) as an explanation of how single words may entail the range of their contextual insertions. Its long duration within the corpus of Umberto Eco’s semiotic works suggests that this recurring concept plays a central and foundational role within the framework of our author’s version of interpretive semiotics. Let us examine it more closely, in a bid to: (a) contextualise its various formulations in the body of texts wherein such occurrences appear; (b) connect the occurrences to the semiotic theories that inspire the general concept they express; (c) extrapolate a variety of possible consequences from the concept itself, through a change of scale – from the single sememe (= Content Unit) to the text as a whole – that may authorise us to reformulate the quote as follows: “the text is an inchoative/ virtual interpretation whereas an interpretation is an expanded text”.