Formal scripts and meanings. A script-based approach to textual forms and their relevance towards interpretation

Abstract

Human knowledge is based on cognitive processes primarily functioning with reference to frames or models drawn from prior experience. This principle, original to psychology and anthropology, is now widely acknowledged by all research fields with a cognitive orientation, from sociology to linguistics, to artificial intelligence. In linguistics such a principle has been taken into consideration by script theory (Schank / Abelson 1977), which investigates the ways meaning comes into being from the setting of semantic possibilities activated by lexematic ‘handles’ (Attardo 2001: 3). Such an approach, which proved effective especially in studying humour (see Raskin 1985), focuses exclusively on the semantic level of the semiotic phenomenon, completely obliterating the possibility that also formal features in a communicative move might contribute, even if peripherally, to the organization of meaning. Our claim is that the form of a text (i.e., its format, layout, syntactic organization, etc.) is not neutral as to its processing, but contributes to the orientation of the hermeneutic process. The hypothesis of formal scripts that we introduce in this article maintains that, given a set of particular formal features, a script is activated, according to which it is possible to make sound inferences as to the general meaning, or semantic orientation, and purpose of a text even before starting to process it (or, at least, before processing it in its integrity). The aim of this article is to provide a sound theoretical basis to our hypothesis – relying on the main concepts of script theory (Schank / Abelson 1977) and of genre analysis (Swales 1990, 2004; Bhatia 1993, 2004) – and, subsequently, to outline examples of formal scripts activated by textual formal features.