The narrative program

Current Studies in Foreign Language Education, 2023

Today, all kinds of instructive or artistic texts that contain a specific message, regardless of the field, have emerged through the meaningful sequence of signs. For instance, an anatomy text for the medical sciences, a physics text for the engineering sciences, or a biology text for the natural sciences can be given as examples for the instructive text type. The other type of text appears in the artistic field, which has a robust aesthetic side and requires interpretation. On the other hand, the sub-texts that contribute to forming the central texts in the artistic field are generally narrative and representational texts. Along with the instructive texts produced by verbal and/or nonverbal signs, artistic texts have also become an essential part of the teaching/learning process. Many of the texts are frequently used as supplementary material in language classrooms. Thus, artistic texts make thematic or linguistic achievement and signification processes active and promote the teaching/learning continuum. It is possible to shape the adjuvant process with different theoretical backgrounds, methods, and techniques. One of these theories is semiotics: New ways of thinking, understanding, and interpretation methods have been developed throughout human history. Humans produce meaningful structures and use various methods to comprehend them efficiently. Semiotics has gained importance as one of the study fields that analyzes conditions of sign production and their meanings. It is one of the critical scientific fields of the twenty-first century that attempts to explain the facts and phenomena of different systems belonging to nature and culture. In recent years, semiotics has interacted with different fields of science and daily life thanks to the studies done by semioticians. Thus, the study field has been associated with different disciplines, leading to increased interdisciplinary studies. Therefore, semiotics is a field of science that can signify many systems from social sciences to engineering sciences, from fine arts to natural sciences, from human sciences to everyday life (Kalelioğlu, 2023, pp. 109-110). Semiotics closely relates to all fields of science and paves the way for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies. However, perhaps since there is the investigation of an abstract concept of “meaning” at the core of semiotics, there are not many researchers and practitioners in our country who conduct studies in semiotics and transfer the results of the studies to the in-classroom teaching/learning period. For this reason, one of the key objectives of this study is to propose an applicable methodology on how semiotic theory, techniques, and analysis instruments can be used in research and classroom practice. Since the object of this study is a literary artwork, we placed a short story genre, which is more of a narrative text type, at the center of the investigation. “The Lottery”, written by Shirley Jackson, has been selected for this study. Throughout the study, how meaning is constructed in various semantic layers within the formation process and how each layer is articulated to form the semantic universe of the text by the author of the narrative will be addressed.

The application of the narrative model to a "text" obviously implies that the latter is somehow organized in the manner of a story; and while this is easy enough to admit, in the case of some genres of verbal discourse, such as novels, short stories, myths, and folktales (but more controversial in the case of experimental reports, for which Bastide 1979 has nevertheless made a case ), and not very problematic either as far as some kinds of pictorial material , like films and comic strips, are concerned, the suggestion that the picture, in the most central, prototypical sense, i.e. the single, static picture, should contain a narrative level of construction, is difficult even to make sense of. In fact, before even beginning the quest for this sense, we have to distinguish at least five different categories of pictorial objects to which our interrogation about narrative organization would seem to apply with rather different results: a. The temporal series: The continuous series of moving pictures, as in a cinematographic film, and, often, on television.

2006

A tool introduced by Rastier (and based on Sowa, 1984), the semantic graph can be used to represent any semantic structure in terms of semes and the relations between them. The semes are the nodes of the semantic graph (shown in boxes or brackets) and the relations are the links (shown in ellipses or parentheses). The arrows indicate the direction of the relation between nodes. Most semantic structures can be described using fifteen or so different links – like ERG (ergative) for the agent of an action and ACC (accusative) for the patient of an action. This is an example of a simple graph: [Prince] ← (ERG) ← [RESCUE] → (ACC) → [Princess].

Introduction to the special issue of Semiotica on the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Course in General Linguistics

Prin ted in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3634-1 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-8472-9 (paper) Prin t on acid-free paper Toronto Studies in Semiotics and Communication