The "individual forming meaning with a text" is a private and fundamental semiotic process involving relationships among text, individual, and meaning. Prior to an individual's use of language for aesthetic purposes lies the presupposition of the aesthetic language act--that the individual approaches the text expecting to work and be rewarded. Developmental semiotic structures remain the semiotic means for all occasions of representation for personal conceptual growth and for communication. While ordinarily the mature language user's inner semiotic activity functions minimally, the pressures of certain rhetorical situations place special demands on individuals' interior semiosis. The hiatus between the ordinary use of language and the aesthetic use enables the perceiver to commence work on the text. Clues point in two directions to absent fictive attributes, vertically across both systems and horizontally in pace with the temporal progression of the fiction. (DF)