Communication is said to be problematic, endangered by failures to understand each other; and the fictive communications in literary texts are said to depict the characteristics of factual communication. These are: (i) communication is a form of social acting; (ii) communication is fallible and problematical; (iii) literature is a paradigm of a type of communicative acting that should be the object of empirical-semiotic inquiry; (iv) literary communication is a condensed form of aesthetically 'problematized' communication.