The Social Semiotics in Ghassan Kanfani's Al Ghamis Al Masrugh Short Story Based on Halliday's Approach

IntroductionThe interconnection of language and the social organization have been considered by linguists and socialists so much that the common issues of the role-based linguists and the social linguists, the sociology of language, the discourse analysis, and the language issues have been concerned with the social behavior not separated from the social structure. Halliday, the pioneer of organized grammar firstly introduced the social semiotics, he found language as the social sign in which meaning was encoded by social facts.
The Social SemioticsSemiotics is the general study of signs in the commonest concept. "Being social is equal to culture, hence the social semiotics is the study of society or culture like the organization of meanings that bilaterally communicate with language; the social culture produces language which enters the worldwide of signs and the ideological organization of society to reproduce the social culture and organization" (Ahmad, 2001, p. 51). In this respect, Halliday set up "the principles of language theory as the social signs. The main elements of social semiotics are the social-cultural texture, signs, text, setting, the pragmatic kind of lingual organization and the discourse foundations" (Halliday, 1978: 111).
The Analytical Processing of the IssueActions, thoughts and receptions make up a major part of our everyday experiences in life; an important role of the language is to classify these dispersed experiences as linguistic symbols. Halliday, in the systematic role-play order, portrays this role as representing or thinking. (Fowler, 2012: 63-64). Regarding the meta-role, "the main point is the collection of lingual choices of the author and a writing that can be expressed in another way. Such interpretation lets the researcher recognize the suitable and unsuitable, the lingual choices" (Ahmad, 1989: 89). In this research, we emphasize the narrator's choices and his emphasis on the temporary organization of language by using the verb process. There are three changeable components: the main process that associates with the verb group dividing into three main processes and three subdivisions. Every process depicts the kinds of verbs. Therefore, the objective process includes all of the verbs that depict an event. The subjective process bears human's perceptions and the connective process contains the specific, changeable branches. However, the subdivided processes are recognized more clearly than the three main processes, because they connect to the three regions of behavior, speech, and an absolute existence.
a) The Social DistanceThe social distance deals with the sharing control. "If one cause controls the other more in the bilateral relations, such relations are called cohesive, but if they are at the same level such as friendship and enmity, it is called non-cohesive. Hence, their past relations are important, they manifest the social structure that is effective in the communicative styles" (Halliday, 2014, p. 141). Accordingly, the study of the dominative discourse of characters in the story approves the bilateral (cohesive and non-cohesive) relations in the aforementioned story.
b) CohesionHalliday has found "cohesion as the conceptual meaning that depicts the meaningful relations in the text" (Balhoot, 2011, p. 211). He claims that "a being text or everything that makes a text means the presence of grammatical (reference, replacement, deletion) tools, the (contrary, repetitive and synonym) words, and the connectives (additional, causative, superlative, time) that are the network of meaningful relations between sentences, clauses, and discourse"( Aghagol Zadeh, 2013, p. 160).
c) ReferenceReferral is an element that can be interpreted by referring to another element and its meaning is determined by the discovery of its reference. From Heledia's point of view, "pronouns, references, dashes, and alphabets are the most important reference elements that are divided into two types of intranets and outsourced text". (ibid, 122). "The external reference is based upon the external texture, it means that the author doesnt find any reader reference in the text, and he requires the information outside the text". (Sadieh, 2014: 3). In this story, the external reference is only exerted in one case which is discussed in the body of the essay in details.
ConclusionThis study presents the text of the story entitled Al Ghamis based on the discourse analysis. Here, we take into consideration: transferring the objective concepts, the analysis of discourse principles in the inter-individual and textual levels mong the elements of cohesion, the element of repetition, the references of the pronouns and incremental letters, play the most role in the coherence and semantic continuity of the various clauses.