The Analysis of the Semiotic Interaction between Speech and Cartoons: The Conceptual Development and Creative Usage of Linguistic Idioms.

Language learning is not just the learning of vocabulary and grammar. Idioms are the useful structures between language speakers, especially in spoken language.  Maybe the mysterious nature of these structures makes the speakers to be interested in using them. It was said mysterious because they do not have combinational meaning. Idioms have their own context of use and it motivates speakers to use them because the proper use of idioms shows the high level of communication skill of a foreign language learner. But due to the special structure of idioms, it is so hard to learn them.Besides, cartoon is a kind of image which is simple, attractive and borderless.It seems that the interaction between idiom and cartoon results in revealing connotational meaning of idiom and in this way, cartoon develops the literal meaning of idiom.There are various studies on the relationship between text and image in book illustration, teaching language and different sciences and they have confirmed the positive impact of image especially in the form of cartoon or caricature in learning but there is no research about the role of cartoon in learning English idioms to Persian native speakers from the semiotic point of view.This paper aims to evaluate the effect of interaction between speech and cartoon and achieve the effective features of cartoons in revealing the covert meaning of idioms, in the process of English idioms teaching to Persian speakers from semiotic point of view. In this paper, the main problem is how the cartoon, in relation to idioms, changes the space of sense-making from an unpredictable semiotic space to a creative one and how this interaction causes a creative semiotic space to develop the concept of idioms. To evaluate this paper`s hypotheses, we used visual semiotics approach and discourse analysis method. The statistical population of this research includes 60 English language learners in intermediate and advanced level including 30 girls and 30 boys from north and south of Tehran. The hypotheses of this study are that: firstly, cartoons can cause the semiotic development via the sign spaces interaction, inducing a new cognition and developing the scope of imagination. Secondly, speech and cartoon can cause creative usage of idioms via making referential space, using the discourse dimensions and developing the linguistic game in inter-semiotic space.The results show that, cartoons with the appropriate functions of cognitive, sensory- perceptual, emotional and aesthetic dimensions of discourse in which there are maximal transdiscourse relationship with idioms and make an effective interpretation or metadiscourse, cause a creative process and transcend the denotational meaning of idioms to connotational one. So, they can be considered as prosthesis for idioms. As a result, the hypotheses of this research are confirmed.