[2] Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni extended the concept to denote the repetition of not only semes, but also other semiotic units (like phonemes for isotopies as rhymes, rhythm for prosody, etc.).
[5] The concept was highly influential and has been revisited and redefined by multiple authors, starting from Greimas, to his epigons of the Paris school, Umberto Eco,[5] the Groupe μ, and others.
He noted that there are cases in which an isotopy is not a repetition of a seme, like in the French sentence l'ami des simples = l'herboriste, in which ami (meaning lover, friend or fan) and simples (medicinal plants) does not appear to share a seme; to also embrace cases like this, Eco replaced the concept of "repetition" with the concept of "direction", defining isotopy more generally as "a constancy in going in a direction that a text exhibits when submitted to rules of interpretative coherence.
She identified semantic, phonetic, prosodic, stylistic, enunciative, rhetorical, presuppositional, syntactic, and narrative isotopies.
Semantic isotopies alone can denote at times contextual disambiguation, subcategorization and selection restriction, anaphoric antecedent attribution, morphological agreement, or even other phenomena.