Constructive Interpretation and Text Transformation
Elin McCready · 2022
This paper considers the project of active transformation of texts through the substitution of words, for instance by the ‘N+7’ method of the Oulipans, which replaces each noun in a text by the seventh subsequent noun in a particular (print) dictionary. This method is conservative in that it only allows for intracate- gorial substitutions; the present paper aims to extend existing semantic interpre- tative mechanisms in order to handle intercategorial substitution. A type shifting system is proposed for this purpose, and applied to an example, followed by discussion of implications and extensions of the system.