This section presents Ricœur's hermeneutical philosophy of texts (Ricœur, 1979, 1981a, 1981b). Contrary to the romantic hermeneutics of the 19th century, the interplay between text and reader is central to Ricœur, so the hermeneutical process is not a quest for the intention of the writer but a process of making the text meaningful in the context of the reader. But this is not an a priori choice. It is a consequence of Ricœur's analysis of the phenomenology of text.
Basically, a Text [⇒ What Is Text?] is a sequence of sentences, each sentence consisting of a sequence of words, each level contributing to the interpretation process and the phenomenology of the text in different ways. The level of words is covered by structural linguistics, the level of sentences by semantics.
This distinction between structuralism and semantics is a stratification developed by Benveniste (1974). Semantics is here understood as the ability of a sentence to refer to a situation. By means of grammatical markings and other devices, the utterer may make the sentence refer to the situation where language is put to use.
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