1. I would like to thank Professor Paul de Man (Yale University), Professor Jonathan Culler (Oxford University) and Mr. Michael Ryan (Yale University) for their valuable suggestions. The quotations, as far as they were originally in German or Dutch, are translated by me into English.
2. This is a translation from D. W. Fokkema's definition in his Dutch article “Semiotiek en Structuralisme in de Sovjetunie”,Forum der Letteren 15 (1974), p. 138.
3. Roland Barthes, “Élements de sémiologie”,Communications (1964), pp. 91–135.
4. Umberto Eco,Einführung in die Semiotik, transl. Jürgen Trabant, Uni-Taschenbücher 105 (Munich: Fink, 1972).
5. Doede Nauta,The Meaning of Information (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1972).