Analysis of the semantic semiotics of the story of "the Pearl Leaf" by Enjavi Shirazi

Examining and reviewing the formal and semantic layers of Persian language stories is one of the tasks in the field of contemporary literary criticism. The cultural and linguistic functions of folk tales are the reason for preserving and examining them via literary criticism. They also increase the importance of such stories. The purpose of this study is to investigate the folk tale of "the Pearl Leaf" by Enjavi Shirazi based on structuralists and poststructuralists’ viewpoint. So, adopting a descriptive-analytical approach based on Greimas’ theory, the method of producing and receiving the meaning of this story has been studied and analyzed. Greimas, the semantic semiotician, sought to provide a coherent model for the study of narrative, which was later called the modern semantic semiotics. According to him, the important thing is to know the process of text production from the time of transmission to reception, based on the Actantial and sensitivity elements. In this way, fiction can be considered as a suitable platform for discourse exploration and integration of literature and discourse; since linguistic narrative has opened new windows in the field of fiction. In this study, using the theme of this story, different types of intelligent discourse system and their factors have been extracted. Finally, it has been concluded that although this story comes from the heart of popular culture (folklore), with an appearance simple, yet complex and coherent form, it has a specific structural and narrative pattern and form- Propp's morphology - which has made it fully compatible with Greimas’ theory of semantic semiotics.