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meaning-constitutive. Among the text parts consisting of words we find a text part which has a compositionally connex and

complete visual figura: it is the Mouse tail (Carroll 1982:28) referred to previously. When analysing the textural connexity of

the pictures, it is important to recognise figures representing one and the same person and/or animal. In AAW in Carroll

(1982) for example, there is on each of the pages 12, 13, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 33, 38, 40, 52, 56, 57, 61, 71, 74, 80, 85, 89, 103,

and 109 a girl-figure representing Alice, even if these figures differ from one another both as to their internal proportions and

as to their proportion with respect to one and the same objects/persons; another example may be the picture of the Cheshire

Cat on pages 57, 59 and 77, the first picture showing the whole figure, the second one mainly its head, and the third one only

its head. Limitations of space do not allow me to treat the compositional connexity of pictures, and the connexity and

completeness of the visual figura of the full text consisting of pictures and words, but I wish to mention an example: the visual

figura of the autonomous text-part ‘You are old, Father William’ (Carroll 1982:42–5) is a compositionally connex and

complete picture-and-verse text-unit: it begins with a picture on the bottom of page 42, which is followed by four strophes

and an adjoining picture on page 43, and then by a picture and four adjoining strophes on page 44, and finally closes with a

picture at the top of page 45.

The acoustic figura plays an eminently relevant role in verse; however, like the visual figura, it may have a meaningconstitutive role and/or may facilitate understanding in other types of texts as well. The acoustic figura has a different status

according to whether texts received by listening or text received by reading (seeing) are concerned. In the first case the

acoustic figura is the object of the perception of the receiver, while in the second case the receiver must construct it. In the

latter case the receiver, of course, must know the semiotic system (language), out of the elements of which the text has been

brought about, because he can construct the acoustic figura only in interaction with the revelation of the syntactic and sensesemantic organisation of the text to be received.

After these remarks let me consider some examples in connection with the acoustic figura of AAW: (i) the acoustic figura

(the metric-rhythmic and the rhyme pattern) of the verse-insertions in AAW will be constructed in the same way as is usual

with verse; only one example should be mentioned here concerning the rhyme pattern: the second strophe of the song of the

Mock Turtle (Carroll 1982:95):

‘Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,

Game, or any other dish?

Who would not give all else for two p

enny worth only of beautiful Soup?

Pennyworth only of beautiful soup?

Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!

Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!

Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,

Beautiful, beauti—FUL SOUP?

The organisation of the third and fourth line of this strophe (the way in which the word ‘pennyworth’ is printed in these lines)

is a very unusual way of ensuring that the rhyme pattern of this strophe remains identical with that of the first strophe; and the

visual image of the last four lines of the second strophe can be understood as a kind of score for the acoustic image to be

produced; (ii) the dashes of different length in the verse-insertions and also in prose-parts indicate pauses of different length

(and/or character); (iii) in the text-parts in prose the text-pieces in italics which are not between quotation marks always

indicate stressed elements and thus they influence the production/construction of the acoustic figura; (iv) one part of the

language puns (cf. the tale/tail-example already mentioned which can be explained by the homophonic nature of this nonhomographic pair of words) can only be understood in the light of both the visual and the acoustic figura. To illustrate the

connection of the visual and the acoustic figura, in TLG we find an even more complex example—an example of iconic

character—(Carroll 1982:150):

Alice couldn’t see who was sitting beyond the Beetle, but a hoarse voice spoke next. ‘Change engines’ it said, and there

it choked and was obliged to leave off.

‘It sounds like a horse,’ Alice thought to herself. And an extremely small voice, close to her ear, said ‘You might

make a joke on that—something about “horse” and “hoarse,” you know.’

(The petite setting always recurs when the ‘extremely small voice’ is speaking.)



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2.2.2

Notatio: the formal organisation of the vehiculum as a semiotic object

When analysing the notatio, it has to be established first how many notatio-systems the elements of the text to be interpreted

belong to, then the analysis of the connexity and the completeness of the element-configurations belonging to the individual

systems should follow. There are notatio-systems which differ from each other also figurally, e.g. hand-written/printed text

vs. pictures, sound-text vs. music, and, within the verbal written medium, writing in Latin vs. writing in Arabic letters. There

are also notatio-systems which cannot—or not so easily—be differentiated from each other formally; these systems include

all languages using Latin letters.

Let us see some examples from Carroll’s works to illustrate the different verbal notatio-systems: in AAW we find a French

utterance ‘So she began again: “Où est ma chatte?”, which was the first sentence in her French lesson-book’ (Carroll 1982:

21). As a matter of fact, in the verse-insertion Jabberwocky in TLG, elements of two different notatio-systems have also been

mixed: those of the real and those of a potential English language. Let me demonstrate this mixture by the first strophe

(Carroll 1982:134):

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre andgimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

It is to be mentioned that the setting-form in mirror characters of this strophe can again be considered as belonging to another

notatio-system: ‘she turned over the leaves, to find some part that she could read, “—for it’s all in some language I don’t

know,” she said to herself.’ (Alice’s comment on it in Carroll 1982:133.)

The analysis of the connexity of the notatio is, as a matter of fact, the analysis of the syntactic organisation. With respect to

the aspect of the composition, this means primarily the analysis of the syntactic organisation of the individual utterances/textsentences, secondarily the investigation of what can be said about the syntactic organisation of the higher level hierarchic

units (paragraphs and chapters)—if it is at all possible to tell anything about the syntactic organisation of these units without

taking the sense-semantic aspect into consideration. With respect to the aspect of the texture, connexity is carried by the

recurrence of units of the same syntactic organisation at any hierarchic level.

Syntactic composition-units are syntactically-connex word-configurations, syntactically-connex formulaic-patterns, and

syntactically-connex configurations of syntactic categories. For example, the formulaic pattern of the strophe quoted from

Jabberwocky is the following:

Twas_____, and the _____ y_____ s

Did _____ and _____in the_____:

All____ y were the____s,

And the _____ _____s _____.

In the strophe quoted the slots of this pattern are filled by potential English words. Hockett demonstrates the syntactic

connexity (syntactic well-formedness) of this pattern by constructing sentences in real English fitting this pattern. One of

these sentences is the following: ‘Twas morning, and the merry sunbeams did glitter and dance in the snow; all tinselly were

the treetops, and the happy fairies frolicked.’ (Hockett (1958:262); the italics are mine; cf. also Sutherland (1972:208ff.).)

Hockett’s sentence is a syntactically-connex word-configuration, and thus we can also consider the original strophe as a

syntactically-connex word-configuration, despite the fact that its lexical elements do not belong to one and the same notatio

system. If we substitute the constituents of this wordconfiguration by functional syntactic-categories, we obtain a

syntactically-connex configuration of syntactic categories. One can easily understand that syntactically-connex (syntactically

well-formed) category-configurations of paragraphs (and chapters) cannot be defined in the same sense as they can be defined

for clauses or for simple sentences. Consequently, it is reasonable to ask whether we can speak at all of text syntax, and if we

can, in what sense. While it is obvious that pronominalisation, use of conjunctions, use of tenses —all relevant factors of the

text organisation—also have a syntactic aspect, the crucial point remains that it is not the syntactic aspect which dominates in

the organisation of texts.

However, in TLG we encounter a syntactic organisational factor (occurring twice) which should be mentioned. This factor

is the chapter-connecting function of a text-sentence pattern: (i) the title of Chapter IV is an organic constituent of the closing

sentence of Chapter III (Carroll 1982:158–9):



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So she wandered on, talking to herself as she went, till, on turning a sharp corner, she came upon two fat little men, so

suddenly that she could not help starting back, but in another moment she recovered herself, feeling sure that they must

be

[CHAPTER IV]

TWEEDLEDUM AND TWEEDLEDEE



(ii) even more radical is the connection between the chapters X and XI, also reinforced by the illustrations belonging to

them (Carroll 1982:240–1):

CHAPTER X

SHAKING



SHE took her off the table as she spoke, and shook her backwards and forwards with all her might.

The Red Queen made no resistance whatever: only her face grew very small, and her eyes got large and green: and

still, as Alice went on shaking her, she kept on growing shorter—and fatter—and softer—and rounder—and—

CHAPTER XI

WAKING



—and it really was a kitten, after all.

The syntactic connexity of the textural organisation is ensured by the recurring word-configurations, formulaic patterns and,

configurations of syntactic categories. Examples of the recurrence of word-configuration are the refrain of the first and third

strophe of the verse-insertion (in Chapter X of AAW) Will you walk a little faster (Carroll 1982:90), and the recurring

expression ‘and the moral of that is’ in the statements of the Duchess in Chapter IX (Carroll 1982:79–81). The pattern ‘I…

what I…’ in Chapter VII in AAW is an example of the recurrence of formulaic patterns where the pattern mentioned recurs in

the text-sentences ‘I mean what I say’, ‘I see what I eat’, ‘I eat what I see’, ‘I like what I get’, ‘I get what I like’ (Carroll 1982:

61). It is primarily in verse that the recurrence of configurations of syntactic categories plays (or may play) a relevant role. A

very simple example of this is the following nursery rhyme: ‘Solomon Grundy,/ Born on a Monday,/ Christened on Tuesday,/

Married on Wednesday,/ Took ill on Thursday,/ Worse on Friday,/Died on Saturday/Buried on Sunday./ This is the end/of

Solomon Grundy.’ In this nursery rhyme the recurring category configuration is Pred+Advtemp. (Recurring configurations of

syntactic categories may of course also be found in both AAW and TLG.) Without going into further details, I want to

mention that the frequency of certain patterns/categories may be characteristic of the style of an author, even if the connexitycarrying role of a special configuration is of no particular relevance.

2.3

Sensus: the sense-semantic organisation of the vehiculum

The sense-semantic organisation of the vehiculum can/should be investigated from two points of view: from the aspect of the

language, out of the elements of which the text is constructed (let us call this aspect ‘language-specific organisation’), and

from the aspect of the world-fragment (presumably expressed in the text) indicated by the language-specific sense-semantic

organisation of the text (let us call this aspect ‘relatum-specific organisation’). In order to characterise the sense-semantic

organisation, we investigate its connectedness called ‘cohesion’ and its completeness, differentiating between textural and

compositional cohesion and completeness, respectively.

2.3.1

Sensus: the language-specific sense-semantic organisation of the vehiculum

To illustrate the types of language-specific sensus let us take the following text-sentence from AAW (Carroll 1982:26):

This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it stood for a long time with one finger

pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest

waited in silence.



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This text-sentence—like text-sentences and texts in general—can be assigned the following types of sensus: (i) conceptual

verbal sensus (the sensus we obtain by combining the verbal sensus which can be assigned to the individual words of the textsentence in the given verbal context); (ii) conceptual non-verbal sensus (a picture-like mental-image which we create (which

arises in us) during the reception of this text-sentence); (iii) non-conceptual sensus (the experience or feeling which we

associate with the conceptual verbal and/or non-verbal sensus of this text-sentence). Let us investigate now some aspects of

these three sensus-types.

Conceptual verbal sensus.



Three aspects of the conceptual verbal sensus can be distinguished: the relational, the inferential and the configurational.

From the relational aspect the conceptual verbal sensus is an elementary proposition or a proposition-complex. An

elementary proposition is, to put it simply, a relation expressed in the form predicate+its arguments; the relation indicated by

the predicate exists among the entities represented as arguments. (In the frames of this presentation it is not possible to discuss

questions concerning the propositions in detail. In what follows I will represent the units to be handled as propositions in a

form which is near to the surface structure and will mark them off from other parts of the text by using another type of

setting.) For example, in the part of the above-quoted text-sentence which precedes ‘without’, the following two propositions

are manifested: (i) IT WAS NOT THE CASE, THAT DODO COULD DO SOMETHING, where this DO SOMETHING is

(ii) DODO ANSWERS THIS QUESTION. In the given verbal context the reference of the expressions ‘Dodo’ and ‘this

question’ are known. In a text, as in the text-sentence quoted, however, not only is the reference a relevant factor, but also the

co-reference: we are to recognise that ‘it/its’ in ‘it stood’ and in ‘its forehead’ are co-referent with the expression ‘Dodo’;

further, to recognise that the expressions ‘thought’ and ‘finger’ are to be understood as the thought and the finger of it

(namely the Dodo). One can easily see that for these recognitions language competence alone does not suffice. (I will return to

the question of reference/co-reference later.)

The inferential aspect is a highly relevant aspect of verbal communication. It is the capacity to draw inferences which

renders the economy of communication possible (among other topics, the understanding of a text without it being necessary

for everything to be set forth in detail), even if on the other hand false inferences may cause confusion in the communication.

There are numerous types of inferential conceptual verbal sensus, but I only want to illustrate four of them by examples, (i) In

the verbal context in which the expression ‘beautiful Soup!’ has been repeated several times, it is not at all difficult to

perceive (to create the acoustic figura of) the expressions ‘Beauootiful Soo-oop’ and ‘beauti-FUL SOUP!’ (in AAW Ch. X;

Carroll 1982:95) in the right way; similarly, after the expression ‘and the moral of that is’ has been repeated several times, it

is easy to identify the expression-fragment ‘and the m____’ (AAW Ch. IX in (Carroll 1982:81). This inference-type can be called

morpho-syntactic inference, (ii) We understand an utterance/text-sentence in most cases in such a way that we assign to the

individual words of the utterance/text-sentence our knowledge about the object/property/… indicated by the word in question.

(This knowledge is called, when represented in an explanatory dictionary, an ‘explication’, and, when inferred, an

‘implicature’.) The assignment of the explications may, of course, also be carried out on the quoted text-part beginning with

‘This question…’. We should also bear in mind that explications are not definitions—i.e. are not implications in both

directions—, the explicans does not represent the necessary and sufficient condition of the explicandum. Thus it is often

difficult to name an entity from the knowledge of certain properties of it. AAW offers examples illustrating this difficulty,

e.g. the following one: in Ch. VI we can read that ‘suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood’ (Carroll 1982:

50); we can assign to the word ‘footman’ the following knowledge: ‘liveried servant for…’, where ‘servant’ is understood as

a ‘person who has undertaken (…) to carry out the orders of an individual…’, i.e. a footman is a liveried person. (As to both

explications cf. The Concise Oxford Dictionary; the italics are mine.) Only if we are aware of the difficulties concerning the use

of explications is it possible to understand the remark of the narrator standing in brackets after the expression quoted: ‘(she

considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a

fish)’. As a possible solution to this problem, in the text to follow the indication ‘Fish-Footman’ also occurs, (iii) Among the

inferences there are some which emphasise the conceptual verbal sensus of the text-sentence in question by contrast. In Ch.

XI of AAW we find an example which also contains the background of the contrast explicitly (Carroll 1982:100): ‘“I am a

poor man, your Majesty”, he began. /“You’re a very poor speaker,” said the King.’ The elements in italics in the text (on

which in living speech an extra stress would be laid) can be assigned the following inferences: You are not only simply poor,

but very poor, and not as a man, but as a speaker. The function of setting some elements in the text of AAW in italics—if they

are not representations of titles—is to express differentiating semantic stress, (iv) The fourth inference-type to be mentioned here

may be called syllogistic inference; such an inference can be found, for example, in AAW Ch. XII: ‘At this moment the King

(…) read out from his book, “Rule Forty-two. (…)” /(…)/ “It’s the oldest rule in the book,” said the King. / “Then it ought to

be Number One,” said Alice,’ (Carroll 1982:105). Syllogistic inferences may often be applied in different ways to one and the

same text-part. In AAW Ch. VII we can find an example to illustrate this: ‘“Take some more tea”, the March Hare said to

Alice, very earnestly. / “I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone: “so I ca’n’t take more.” / “You mean you