Contradictory Significations of the Audio-Spatial Signs in Tom Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favor: A Semiotic-Cognitive Approach

This paper investigates the contradictory significations of the audiospatial signs in Tom Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favor. Four linguistic signs with their inconsistent semiotic meanings are examined in this paper: Cell, School, Office and Music. This paper addresses one research question: How does Stoppard shift the semiotic focus of the four selected signs from their schematic encoded meanings towards new contradictory significations? The main objective of the paper is to explore the extent to which the significations of the four selected signs, within particular contexts, can be reallocated to assign new meanings that run counter to their cognitive framework. The paper draws on two approaches: The first is the semiotic approach developed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1916/ 1959) and Charles Peirce (1931-1958). The second is van Dijk's (2008, 2009b) socio-cognitive approach .This paper has two main findings: First, Stoppard manages to rebalance the semiotic interpretative nature of the selected audio-spatial signs away from their schematic focus towards new specific contradiction-oriented significations. Second, Stoppard creates a cognitive connection between the play's character-to-character level of discourse, motivated by a dexterous use of some contextualization cues, and the play's intended message on the author-to-reader level of discourse, supported by the reader's cognitive ability to grasp the play's communicative context pertaining to the contradictory significations of each linguistic sign.