In the Semiotics of Juxtaposition Toward an Interpretation of the Poetics of Reference in Between Water and Me by Fawziya Abu Khalid

This study examines the concept of juxtaposition as a complex semantic and semiotic relation manifested in causal association, as in Poirce’s indexical sign, and in the paradigmatic relations theorized by Yakpsun through projection of axis of selection onto the axis of combination within poetic function. This projection highlights interaction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes in production of poetic meaning. Adjacency also encompasses horizontal relations within speech chain, as addressed by Harris in distributional perspective, through reference, semantic expansion, and contextual relations that generate additional meanings within discourse.The central research problem is articulated through the following question: How is new or added meaning constructed through linguistic and semiotic adjacency in poetic discourse? From this emerge subsidiary questions concerning the formation of adjacency at the semiotic and semantic levels, and the extent to Fauconnier’s Mental Spaces Theory-particularly concept of metonymic space-is suitable for interpreting poetic discourse.Thus, the research adopts a semantic-semiotic methodology grounded in the theory of metonymic spaces within framework of cognitive linguistics. Metonymy is understood as a referential process linking mental, cultural, political, social spaces, rendering adjacency a cognitive, linguistic, and semiotic phenomenon that transcends its reduction to mere stylistic deviation.This approach is applied to the poetry collection Between Water and Me by the poet Fawzia Abu Khalid., through a semiotic analysis of the textures of sign adjacency, Greimas’s concept of semiotic square, the concept of iconic juxtaposition in Mu group, and cultural juxtaposition in Eco.