A semiotic analysis of textual communication in ethical conversation

Abstract EN

Semiotics can be seen as a complementary field to linguistics.

It expands linguistic studies beyond the traditional basic level of structure; the phoneme and the sentence.

Semiotics moves to texts and discourse in order to discover their ideological, performative، and rhetorical functions.

Therefore, its wide scope is human communication and its multimodality.

The present study is an analysis of textual communication in a محاسبة النفس اللوامة‘ traditional book written in Arabic entitled Watching out the Self-Reproaching Soul and ) › و تنبيه الروح النوامة Al-Kaf›ami), a ) ‹ الكفعمي ‘ Awakening the Sluggard Spirit) by religious scholar who lived in the 9th.

century A.H.

in Karbala, Iraq.

The analysis is semiotic in nature through two processes.

The first process approaches the text,through some selected extracts, in terms of the seven standards of textuality by De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) and other complementary paths.

The second process is saved for an attempt to read the whole text in terms of three stages: comprehension, interpretation, and criticism.

The study has concluded that not any ordinary reader is able to work on these three tasks particularly employed to the texts in hand: reading within the text for the sense, reading upon the text for the value, and reading against the text for the critique.