The Semio-Semantic Study of Medical Words and Terms and Their Usage in Persian Colloquial Language

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Assistant Professor of Linguistics , Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University , Tehran, Iran

2 PhD degree in Linguistics, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

In this paper, in order to investigate the implicit meaning  of medical words and terms in relevant semiotic system and to study their usage as symbols in Persian colloquial language,   the proper data were collected from  “Sokhan Oral Dictionary” and “Persian Colloquial Dictionary”, and then their implicit meanings were analyzed based on semantics and semiotics knowledge within Pierce framework. Then while presenting some examples for each concept in the medical semiotic schemes and also illustrating some instances of their  implicit meaning in Persian language, it was distinguished that each of these symbols behave in a new way when confronting the semiotic schemes of Persian language. Most frequent application of medical words and terms is the usage of organ-words in Persian colloquial language. Some of these words are widely used in comparison to the other terms of colloquial Persian language and are mostly applied in their implicit meaning such as the word “gut” in this proverb:“there’s no straight gut in his stomach” (i.e. he is not honest) or the word “skeleton” in this expression:     “ he is like a skeleton” (i.e. he is very thin). In general it was found that such words and terms which are used in the Persian proverbs are mostly represented as icons and are actually counted as metaphors and the metaphors can be considered as iconic signs.

Main Subjects