The semiology of metaphor and imagery in Ahmad Reza Ahmadi's Neshani

Ahmadreza Ahmadi is an Iranian poet and writer of the 1340’s (Solar Calendar, the 1960’s). He started his activities in children’s literature along with poetry. He wrote his first children’s book in 1348 and he has been writing ever since. His works in children’s literature depict a different atmosphere. Reading Ahmadreza Ahmadi’s works foregrounds some signs in readers’ eyes. This article analyses the semiotics of the story “Address”. Semiotics is the study of anything that refers to something else; these signs can take the form of words, pictures, sounds, situations, and objects. In reading Ahmadi’s stories, specially this one, the markedness of imagination is very conspicuous. The studies done on Ahmadi’s work showed that the imagination in his works is a modern and fantastic one, and also because of the simultaneity of imagination, metaphor, and ambiguity, the reader, in the paradigmatic axis, is faced with metaphor in its modern sense, ambiguity, and openness of the text. This article studies the imagination and metaphor that Romantics and Symbolists refer to, and thereupon tries to decipher these signs based on Lakoff’s theories. To this point, first, a summary of the story “Address” is provided, and then I state the theoretical basis of the article. After a definition of semiotics and its features, I talked about the markedness of imagination in Ahmadi’s works, and after stating the difference between thought and imagination (imagination refers to complicated and difficult relationships like a living body, not to the mechanical and one-to-one relationships of things. In thought, a simple thing as likeness is created, and there is no trace of metaphor and sign as in Romanticism or Symbolism) we concluded that imagination in his works is marked. In the discussion about the markedness of imagination in Ahmadi’s works, we considered imagination is his works to be fantastic. Fantastic imagination is the type of imagination that goes beyond the boundaries of imagination, or deforms real dimensions and forms for its needs and directions in a particular way. Fantastic imagination is an infinite, boundless, and normally non-repetitive imagination. In the next discussion the markedness of metaphor is presented. Metaphor can be taken as an aspect of imaginary language. According to linguists, metaphor includes the process of transferring conceptual perception through likeness, in a way that the words in a language are used for a new meaning (afrashi, 20.1390).