ABSTRACT
Another necessary condition for considering Nastaliq calligraphy a semiotic mode is having three metafunctions (i.e., ideational, interpersonal, and textual) through which three layers of meaning are realized. The ideational or experiential metafunction, as Halliday (1978) argues, is related to the part of the meaning – of the clause in language – that is the result of people’s relationship with the outside world and experience of that world. Interpersonal metafunction represents the interactions between people, and textual metafunction is especially related to the ways of ordering and the placement of different parts of the clause in language. In essence, this chapter describes how these three metafunctions of meanings are realized through different resources in Nastaliq calligraphy as a mode.
Based on Halliday’s (1978) social semiotics theory of communication and according to Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006 [1996]), to assume something as a semiotic mode, or for something to constitute a semiotic mode or a known system of meanings like language, it must “realize” the three meanings or metafunctions defined in Halliday’s systemic functional model. Therefore, to understand whether Nastaliq can be considered a distinct semiotic mode as an image in its own right, it is necessary to examine how the three groups of meaning or metafunction manifest in Nastaliq and fulfill the third requisite of mode in multimodal social semiotics. Here, the three functional dimensions in the proposed model are examined in calligraphic forms of Nastaliq.
