You posited societal 'control', and authorial 'control' of meaning separately in posts. You then covered in another post, the reader being able to determine meaning by means not available to either society or the author. Those are three models and they are contradictory. There is some elision in the sentence based on the context with earlier sentences, but then I am sure you would know that and realize that by quoting one sentence, as if it were not informed by context, and claiming you didn't understand it in isolation, would make you because of your earlier statements, a liar and a hypocrite.
NS, the piece I quoted was just one of several phrases/part sentences/etc that I could have guessed the meaning of, but then I might have guessed wrong. I preferred to get the clarification.
As regards the suggestion that I posited "societal 'control', and authorial 'control' of meaning" separately, there is, to a large extent some cross-over. For instance, a writer such as Charles Dickens had a number of meanings tied up in the language of his novels - both within a single novel and across the body of his work. Different people would have taken different messages and ideas from the material. So, yes, the author has some control of the meaning. The same applies to the Bible. For instance, the 4 Gospel writers and writers like Paul wrote for different audiences; it was only later, when the various documents were gathered together, that they became available to be read by other audiences - and at this point in time statements targetted at specific situations began to be principle-ised. You could argue that society - in the sense of the Christian community - began to impose meanings that might not have been there in the original writing.
Then, we have the way in which society develops language over time, such that a word changes its meaning over a period of time. I used the examples of 'wicked' and 'bad' in a previous post. If society didn't want to allow such changes to take place, it can quite easily refuse to include them in a reference book of word meanings - see the French attempt to ban the term 'le weekend'.
So, there is nothing contradictory about both 'authorial' and 'societal' control being at work.
You then suggest that there is a third concept - that of "the reader being able to determine meaning by means not available to either society or the author." I assume, by this, you are referring to reading within context. So, to return to my example oif Charles Dickens; a youngster reading a Dickens novel today may find it interesting, but unless that reader has an understanding of the historical context that Dickens was writing about and into, they will never fully understand the extent of Dickens' intentions and message.
None of these three 'controls' are contradictory; they all play a part in our understanding of written material. Even modern novels have to be understood in the context of the story: if you or I read a novel about life in - say - a rural village in Mid-Wales, we will only pick up parts of the meaning unless we know the cultural and historical context of the setting pretty well. As such novels and even histories can have a variety of different menings, for different people.
