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This article deals with the notion of reality. During the last twenty years, public discourse in Western societies has identified the opposition between the real and the virtual as one of the cultural key questions. Taking concrete examples as a point of departure, the paper investigates the semantics of the polysemic tems virtual and real. A semiotic model of the relation between (human) organisms, concepts and signs is used in order to demonstrate that the virtual cannot be adequately described as something opposed to reality, but must be seen as an indispensable part of it. The way in which organisms constitute reality is discussed in the light of the basic cognitive operations of categorization and the formation of conceptual relations, and also of their linguistic counterparts. The apparent conflict between the real and the virtual, which has led many critics to develop apocalyptic visions of the end of civilization, is, in fact, a phantom, product of an outdated theory of semantics.
An important role in the coherence of texts is played by the distribution of information in the sentence. The present paper especially examines the beginning of sentences (topics). Which syntactic elements are most adequate to initiate a sentence, and which of their characteristics can be considered responsible for this? After a short review of the pertinent literature, we shall present grammatical, semantic and pragmatic factors that organize topicalization. The point of departure are the patterns of basic serialization as defined by the grammar. Deviations of these patterns can particularly be a result of the principle of known information. In addition to this constitutive principle, we can distinguish five regulative principles that lead to non-marked topicalizations (situation, empathy, iconicity, lengthening terms, text connection). In the closing sections, the positioning of phrasal accents and some special types of topics will be discussed. All the examples given are from modem German.