Asocial semiotic analysis of the presence of children in the short stories of Ghassan Kanafani: A case of the short story "Advertising of iron"

The short story "jedran men hadid" by Ghassan Kanafani reflects human values and concepts. It is a world full of excitement in a real atmosphere of exile and displacement felt by the Palestinian people. Because children are the future of the country and, as an important mission, we need to inform and educate them, in this study, we have focused on meta-linguistic and linguistic relationships in the light of the theory of social semiotics by Halliday. We have analyzed the encoding of Palestinian human being, his nostalgia, the indications of the presence of children, and their relationship with these concepts. The results show the author’s concerns for children so that it would be useful at the root of the society. He uses mental and cognitive processes at the highest frequency to encode the reality and help to understand such abstract concepts as freedom, captivity, and exile. In addition, the meta-linguistic features such as signs of temporal and spatial relationships, attitude, facial expressions and behavior are investigated as a supplement to the message and in line with the conveyance of the meaning.