Die Testologia Semiotica von János Sándor Petofi. Auf dem Weg zu einer semiotischen Theorie der menschlichen Multimedia-Kommunikation

As early as the 1970s, János S. PetĘfi proposed to go beyond the cotextual perspective and develop a con- textual theory of the text that would take into account the encyclopaedic knowledge and the poetic, aes- thetic, sociological and ideological dimensions, as well as the communicative situation and the theory of linguistic actions. For PetĘfi, it was clear from the outset that coherence depends on the interpreter and is not a property of the text itself, and so he concluded that a text is coherent if the interpreter succeeds in constructing a mental picture of the extra-linguistic reality described by the text in such a way that all the states described appear as connected by relevant relations. This concept of coherence led PetĘfi (2011) to redefine the semantic components of testologia semiotica: In PetĘfi's theoretical perspective, the fundamen- tal unit of communication is no longer the single text, but multiple texts that are jointly present and co- occurring, overlapping in use, and furthermore capable of constructing the meaning of a message through internal semiotic references. One of the particularities of this category of complex texts — which also ap- plies to texts produced online — is that language retains a decisive role in the constitution of meaning