La struttura assente e il principio di immanenza. Qualche riflessione sul metodo semiotico

Analytic semiotics has always created structures for describing and analysing texts. As was inevitable, ontological questions have emerged on these structures' modes of existence: are they real or abstract? Do they exist in texts, or inside people's heads? Umberto Eco reflected on the status and location of structures almost fifty years ago in his book La struttura assente, in a section of the book that became famous, Section D, which is dedicated to the epistemology of structural models (Eco 1968). In this article I take as my starting point some observations made by Eco at the end of the 1960s in order to see how some assumptions of structuralism influenced the development of semiotics over the decades that followed.