The Semiotics of the Title in the New Yemeni Novel (2015 - 2022): Selected Models

Abstract

The research aims to explain the semiotics of the title in the new Yemeni novel between the years 2015 and the middle of 2022. Four novels that belong to one semiotic field, which is war and the expression of people’s lives in it, were selected. They are Unprotected Migrants by Hayel Al-Madhabi, The Burning Field by Rayan Al-Shaibani, The Cain’s Freak by Balqis Al-Kabsi, and Five Days That No One Heard by Badr Ahmed respectively. The research was based on the semiotic approach and consisted of a preface, a brief introduction that focused on the concept of the title, its importance, its function, and its relationship to semiotics, and four sections that divided the titles, which amounted to (299) novels, into titles that indicate the event or description, a second that indicates the place, and a third that indicates the name of a character or animal and a fourth that indicates time. The research concluded that the titles of the novels mostly revolved around a large semantic field (war, death, love, and history), all of which controlled the writer and directed the title to describe the events he was experiencing whether these events are directly present in the content of the novel and its story, or whether they are indirect, such as in imaginative projections, narrations of history, or other various social topics.