Metalinguistic Analysis of Sadi's Gulistan

The occurrence of any changes in language, as one of the constituents of meaning in the text, leads to the creation of a new style and meaning. Metalinguistic function of language is one of its formal and semantic techniques. In meta-language, the text is written according to the language itself, thus the objectivity and materiality of the language are emphasized and some changes occur in its semantic field. The meta-language finds a higher significance in educational texts intended to induce a particular meaning. According to this linguistic arrangement, it has been tried in present paper to investigate the capacities, examples and formal functions of meta-language in Saadi Shirazi's masterwork, Gulistan, through a descriptive-analytic method based on the formalistic approach. The results show that the synonymous lexical and sentence substitution, the combination of poetry and prose, dialogue, allegory etc. are the most important examples of Meta-language in Gulistan, and, aesthetic functions, intertextuality, authority and monologue, and meaning consolidation are the most significant results of this technique