Semiotics of the Title: A Case Study of Nadiyah al-Mallaḥ’s Divan ‘A Dancing Lament for An Angel Who Has not been Created Yet’

 Semiotics is a new method that has significant capability in reading poetic texts. This method reveals the system of signs and the type of hidden implications in each semiotic system. Relying on transparent principles, it creates common horizons between texts and readers. A title is one of the most important issues discussed in semiotics because it is the key to understanding the secrets of texts. It plays a significant role in revealing the motivation of a literary work. The title constructs the identity of a text and includes its various meanings and implications. It is an instrument for reading the writers’ thoughts and feelings. The poetic titles of Nadiyah al-Mallaḥ, a contemporary Bahraini poet with a romantic orientation, have symbolic signs and characteristics intertwined in a symbolic frame. Her poem titles can be analyzed and interpreted by semiotics. The present study attempts to investigate these signs via semiotics. This descriptive-analytical study examines the morphological, syntactic, and semantic structure of the titles of Nadiyah al-Mallaḥ's poems to present the most significant norm-breaking representations in them. The research results show that the titles of Nadiyah al-Mallaḥ's poems are closely related to their text so that the titles are keys to entering the poet's worldview and the point of intersection between the poet and the texts. In choosing the titles, the poet is affected by his feminine tendency within romanticism, which is consistent with her feelings evident in her language. Her poem titles sometimes express sorrows and sometimes joys. Therefore, through the titles of the poems in her Divan, one can understand the thoughts, ideas, and connections of the poet with God, human, and non-human. The use of too many nominal sentences in the titles implies a kind of proof and permanence in the poet's human thoughts and feelings. Most of the titles of her poems include the mega-concepts of her poetry. She repeats the words in poem titles as an integral part of poetry. The application of artistic mechanisms leading language to aesthetic performance, such as syntactic and visual norm-breaking, is frequently seen in the titles of al-Mallaḥ's poems. Employing deletion in titles is higher than other types of syntactic norm-breaking, and detection is more frequent than other types of visual norm-breaking.