Imperfection (of meaning) in the Semiotic Reading of You Are No Stranger Here

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 MA in Linguistics, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Rafsanjan, Iran

2 Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Rafsanjan, Iran

Abstract

The research scope of fiction literature is widening day by day with new perspectives and horizons; as if the art and capacity of story—and its discourse full of wonder and enigma—refuse to come to a halt. What we read in You Are No Stranger Here (Shomā ke Gharibe Nistid) (Houshang Moradi Kermani, 2015/[1394]) is an autobiographical writing of the author’s childhood and adolescence, in an intimate and profound tone, wherein the reader discovers the meaning of many textual propositions neither subject to primary, pre-given structures nor under the dominance of an actantial program and narratological and manipulative semio-semantics, but rather within the expanse of verbal communication and within two systems: co-occurance and contingency (chance). The present article, using a descriptive–analytical approach,  aims to study these two systems in the aforementioned narrative work. Accordingly—based on the doctrine of the “imperfection (of meaning),” and within Algirdas Julien Greimas’s post-structuralist studies—it examines stative and emotion-oriented semio-semantics and its aesthetic events. Findings suggest that, in contemporary fiction, meaning has acquired new coordinates whose history and geography are constituted not through opposition or parity between form and meaning, but through equivalence between the two; hence, meaning is fluid, elusive, dynamic, and sliding.

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References

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Journal of Linguistics & Iranian Languages
Volume 10, Issue 2
October 2025
Pages 1-17

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History

  • Receive Date: 13 August 2025
  • Revise Date: 28 September 2025
  • Accept Date: 04 October 2025

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