Relation complexity of titles and texts: a semiotic taxonomy

Titles are an interesting textual phenomenon which sheds light upon the type of complexity deriving from the synergistic relation between the words contained within the title and their co-referents within the text base. Titles point forward to their text base for solution and push the text receiver into the reading process with a puzzling task: that of seeking the co-referent items and of matching them with the cataphoric co-referents contained in the title. Such a process is inferential in nature. A certain amount of complexity is already nested within the title, since it contains signs carrying lexical connotations that can be understood and interpreted only after reading a part of or the whole text. Bringing to surface the network of meanings contained in the title is something that may correlate with the text type. There are cases where the incipit immediately provides the co-referents for the cataphoric signs of the title: this is what, for example, happens with newspaper articles. There are other cases where the reading of the complete text is necessary for a deep understanding of the meanings hinted at in the title: this is a more common strategy in fiction, where sometimes the cataphoric signs contained in the title find their counterparts at the end of a short story (e.g. Brown’s The Sentry). At this phase of research, my model proposes to measure the complexity of titles in terms of cataphoricity avoiding any type of differentiation between text types.