Response

Abstract

Umberto Eco, in a highly cited book on the role of the reader and on the semiotic interpretation of (1979), put it this way: could say that there are more things in a text are dreamt of in our text theories. But there are also fewer things are dreamt of' (Eco 1979:38). Among these fewer things Eco finds in a text is Greimas's semiotic actantial model, the model of agents (or actants) and their roles, the basic story grammar we discuss in our paper (Franzosi, De Fazio, Vicari, this volume, 2012:1^12). But for as large a class of that narrative is, it is just one class, one text genre out of many. A story grammar hardly fits non-narrative texts. Yet, even these may contain invariant structures: Roberts's four functional forms—description of a process, description of a state of affairs, judgment of a process, judgment of a state of affairs— applied to measure the intentions of a clause or Vicari's modal verbs (can/could, may/might/must, shall/should/ought to, will/would) applied to analyze social movements' different framing tasks as expressed in their (can/will = prognosis; must/should = diagnosis) (Vicari 2010). Depending upon what we want to see, we focus on different things in a text. Modality would not get us any closer to understanding the social relations of lynching in terms of who does what to/with whom. No more a story grammar would allow us to understand framing tasks or intentionality. It is no doubt this wide variety of things found in that leaves me skeptical of the claim that codebooks and coding rules solve the problem of meaning and interpretation. If a reader brings to the interpretive act Eco's encyclopedia of knowledge where every text refers back to previous texts (Eco 1979:19), what would Professor Popping's codebook look like? Perhaps, the original text that Eco paraphrased in the opening lines of this reply may help us shed further light on this fraught relation between and methods (a new word brings up a new world). There are more things in heaven and earth says Hamlet to Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy (Shakespeare Hamlet