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identifiable in terms of its contribution to the obligatory
meaning. It is a substantial tributary to the mainstream of the
obligatory meaning of the discourse.
Extended and accessory meaning structures abound in
literary texts, particularly in poetry. A poem may run through
tens and even hundreds of lines, but it must have one main meaning
to express; other semantic structures serving as only contributory
to the basic meaning of the poem. Joyce's 'Ulysees', for instance,
runs across a thousand pages, but it covers a single day in the
life of the protagonist. In literary texts, particularly poetry
which is the most highly structured form, the obligatory (or
logical meaning) is reduced to minimal proportions. That is why
some scholars like Jakobson, for instance, regard poetry as
'untranslatable'.
In literary texts, emphasis is not laid on logical meaning
as much as it is laid on rhetorical and aesthetic meaning. It
should be noted that languages tend to differ more radically in
extended or emotive meaning than in obligatory (or referential)
meaning. In referential meaning the signifier is determined in
relation . to the signified or, as Laszlo Antal (1963, p45) puts it,
the meaning of the 'sign' is determined by its denotatum. Antal
writes: "It is obvious that there cannot be a sign which, whether
it denotes relation or anything else, is only a sign without
meaning. Without meaning nothing can be a sign, and the sign can
only be established by its meaning. If something without a meaning
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