THE SEMIOTICS OF FRONT COVER DESIGNS IN LITERARY TEXTS: A STUDY OF ZAYNAB ALKALI'S TEXTS

The concept of semiotics according to Halliday and Hassan (1985: 3) derives initially from the concept of the signs and the modern words that back the term are semianon, semainomenon, which means signifier, signified, used in ancient Greek linguistics by the stoic philosophers. The stoics were the first to evolve a theory of the sign in the 3rd - 2nd century B.C. and the conception they had of the linguistic sign was already well advanced along the lines in which it was developed two thousand years later in the word of Ferdinand de Saussure