Abstract
The book presents a theory of speech. Part I provides the philosophical background: it provides a description of the basic structuring of experience, along (revisionary) Husserlian lines.
Experience is demonstrated to proceed along four strata: the stratum of immediate impressions; the stratum of teleological striving and of rhythm; the stratum of orientation and measuring; and the suprasituative or a-situative viewpoint. Part II formulates a situative semiotics, i.e. a theory of meaning as a definite dimension of situations.
Part III provides a descriptive rhetorics: it describes the role of the situational distance that a speech act must usually overcome; it analyzes the modalities of self-replication and of expansion that speech can employ; and it formulates a critique of the various forms of purported a-situative speech.