C. Dente, Intersemiotic complexity: the word of drama. The dramatic text is also literature, not just literature. The words drama and theatre identify two distinct semantic areas. Drama → written text. Form of fiction designed for stage representation according to specific dramatic conventions Theatre → aspects of the performance, transaction between performer and audience.

Difficult relationship between reality and dramatic illusion: behind each dramatic text there is a performance, or an idea of performance. A dramatic text is not encoded once and for all, it is renewable each time it is staged. The dramatic text can fulfil its communicative function when it is performed: the printed word is no longer virtual dialogue, but becomes real dialogue on stage.

Movements and gestures highlight the deep meaning which the dialogue implies. A scene is engendered by a line, a word or an image. The word, in its turn, is followed by the image. Different codes make up a network of different interacting textualities, whose final aim is to construct audience reception.

Different textualities account for: -outcome of the writing process -outcome of the reading process -current textual interpretation -outcome of rehearsal process -transposition into non-verbal codes -outcome of reception processes, both diachronically and synchronically.

Thus, the interpretation of a dramatic text through its analysis and its staging turns out to be the coordination of an essentially intertextual work. Result: Either reproduction of a given performance and interpretation Or realization of different and very distant productions

Dramatic language: -external axis of communication (production-audience transaction); -internal axis of communication (fictional context of communication among characters on stage). Both axis are ruled by the conventions of a given cultural paradigm.

Most frequent and evident convention: as-if convention, i.e. fictional action perceived as if it were real, occurring in the here and now on stage, and the audience were witnesses of this action. Result: the dramatic dialogue could be studied using the instruments for the analysis of natural dialogue.

In the here and now of the stage, the story unfolds before the audience. The audience is unaware of what the story is about, and the characters cannot give information they would not exchange in a real context. Therefore, one has to accept the idea that a dramatic text is an act of transcription, as well as a mimesis of interaction. The text imitates the complex interactional relation among people, with different types of strategies which help construe the dialogical form. The author cannot confine and constrict his characters.