Semiolinguistics and the Analysis of Agyeya’s Poem “Ki:ra”

Abstract

It is common knowledge that all literature is manifested in and through language. Nonetheless, literary criticism has by and large downgraded a language based approach in favor philosophical, psychological or biographical approaches for the study of literature. The language sensitive approach is necessary and it implies the use of linguistics for the analysis of literary texts. The linguistic approach cannot be used in a traditional sense where linguistics is considered to be a discipline that studies only the phonological, lexical and syntactic structures of a language. In fact there is a need to make linguistics a functional discipline where it is empowered not only to study the structures of language but is also able to correlate the structures to contextually meaningful utterances. In the context of ordinary language the linguistic structures in real life need to be contextualized so that their social function too is analyzed. Extending this phenomenon to literature involves making linguistics sensitive to the creative and aesthetic aspects of literary texts. The globalized linguistics that can study the forms and functions of literary texts has been termed as ``stylistics``, which in this paper is synonymous to semiolinguistics. In this sense semiolinguistics can be considered to be a sub-discipline of linguistics that explicates literary texts by not only analyzing their linguistic features but also by highlighting their ``poetic function`` within the overall created contexts of the text. It is also made clear that linguistics here is provided a ``semiotic`` orientation and makes the use of the term ``semiolinguistics`` relevant and necessary. In this context all linguistic structures are viewed as ``signs`` that necessarily have a ``signification`` as was proposed by Saussure and Barthes. Since the contexts generated in literature are ``fictive`` the contexts too are fictive, but nonetheless they are analogous to real life situations. Further, the language of literature, particularly poetry, is quite distinct in sign formation than the language of ordinary discourse. While the ordinary language of discourse can be said to be creating ``logical signs``, the language of poetry can be said to be manifested through the use of ``expressive signs``. Since the basic material of language, ordinary or literary, is the same, semiolinguistics as a subdiscipline focuses on the transformation of the logical signs into expressive signs. This transformation is called ``semiosis`` which can be seen to be manifested in a threefold inter-linked hierarchical structure where the second level evolves out of the first level and the third level evolves out of the second. The first level consists of the linguistically identified logical signs (phonological, lexical, syntactic and semantic/pragmatic) with a ``discursive function``. At the second level the transformation of the logical signs takes place and it begins to have a ``connotative function``. The third level consists of a higher level where all the significations get correlated into the total text with unique signification and this level displays the ``expressive function`` of the text itself. The present paper will provide a detailed analysis of S. H. V. Agyeya`s poem Ki:ra (Parakeet) on the above-mentioned lines and will also show how the poem iconizes the dynamism of life itself which includes the cycle of life and death. As a poem representative of the earlier phase its structure is different from the poems of the later phases.