The role of semiotics in understanding the significance of proverbs

Abstract

Language is one of the most important factors of human communication since ancient times until the present time. It has gained special importance in studies and investigation. We note that most Western and Eastern scientists and philosophers have been interested in the sciences of logic and speech, so their names are associated with some types of linguistic sciences, including: Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Al-Razi, Al-Farabi, ... and others. Hence, the reference was one of the concerns of scholars and linguists, and they left a lot of literature and antiquities on this subject. However, with the beginning of the last century, the subject of reference took on other importance and dimensions and became a turning point in all social fields (literary, linguistic, political, psychological, ...). Until it became a science called (signal science). To be the language under its shadows, and deals with all aspects of social life. With the beginnings of the second half of the last century, semiotic studies and their relationship to text and discourse gained the attention of scholars, researchers, and those interested in linguistic studies. The discourse, in its various forms and types: political, religious, literary, media and other discourses, was the main axis on which these studies are based. Hence our interest in semiotics and its role in analyzing the speech of proverbs as one of the types of discourse that bears different aspects of meaning and that may need high mental abilities to determine the realistic connotations in it through the context and temporal and spatial factors surrounding the public discourse. It is certain that the discourse is affected by the surrounding circumstances and derives its realistic connotations through the factors surrounding it, such as: psychological, social and cultural factors. Therefore, its connotations may change with changing circumstances surrounding it. Therefore, and in order to analyze the discourse, one can use the linguistic theories and phenomena such as intertextuality, deconstruction, deliberation and interpretation. This is what many researchers and those interested in text and discourse have adopted. But to study the speech of proverbs, especially in the spoken language, he may need a mechanism more than that to determine the real and true meaning of it. Since the proverb is a kind of metaphor and metaphor and carries with it the symbol and the sign, then it must be studied under the frameworks and theories of the science of sign or semiotics in general. And take advantage of the data of this science and apply them to the speech of proverbs, with the aforementioned tools of analysis.