From Units to Meaning: A Semiotic Approach in Mohammed Taqi Bahar's Ngoym

Abstract

Abstract:

The semiotic approach is seen as a contemporary critical approach that focuses on examining discourses and analyzing their structures, with the aim of revealing the mechanisms of meaning production and the formation of signification. The following questions are addressed in this study, which is predicated on the idea that a text is a semantic unit whose components are interconnected and interdependent and whose units function through the relationships that organise them: What interactions exist within the text between semantic units and their relationships? What is formed? What are the pathways? This study examines how the meaning of the poem "Min Naguim" by Muhammad Taqi Bahar is formed at different levels of the text and its generative path from the surface structure to the deep structure, ultimately deriving the system of relationships that produces its meaning. It does this by using a descriptive-analytical approach and applying Greimas. The study revealed that the meaning in Bahar’s poem is not limited to its direct figurative and symbolic manifestations, but rather is shaped through the interconnection of semantic units and the regularity of the relationships between them; thus, contrasts, transformations, and narrative and rhetorical structures converge to reveal—beyond its romantic and emotional surface—a meaning that tends toward

The breadth of semiotics and the diversity of its theoretical origins have paved the way for the emergence of various schools and approaches; a number of these approaches, relying on the achievements of linguistics and structuralism, shifted their focus from the sign itself to discovering the relationships and structures of the signification network. Said Benkrad states that semiotics encompasses all areas of human action and is “a tool for reading all manifestations of human behavior; from simple emotions to social rituals and ideological macrosystems.” He considers the main focus of semiotics to be “the process leading to the production of meaning”; the same phenomenon that is called “semiosis” in semiotics terminology. Hence, semiotics is an interdisciplinary field where language, discourse, literature, the arts, and all cultural systems that create meaning intersect.

expressing political aims with revolutionary and national revivalist tendencies.