Semiotic staging of the ideological point of view in Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship: A social-semiotic approach

Abstract This paper presents a social semiotic analysis to explore the extent to which the ideological point of view in Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship (1967) has been semiotically communicated by a number of oppositional signs: visual (darkness versus light), audible (loud/hard music versus low/soft music), and vocalic (scream versus laughter). More specifically, this paper explores the six signs’ semiotic potential for making meaning by shedding light on the way they operate as conduits of the ideological viewpoint and the way their semiotic staging is textually associated with particular linguistic indicators guiding the pragmatic interpretation of the play. To this end, the paper draws on two theoretical strands: a social semiotic approach as introduced by Hodge and Kress (1988), Kress and van Leeuwen (2001), and van Leeuwen (2005); and Short’s (1996) checklist of linguistic indicators of viewpoint. Two main findings are revealed here: first, the six signs are carriers of the ideological viewpoint by acting as action predictors and motivators, suffering signals, suffering-source highlighters, apathy and arrogance indicators, situation commentators, and call-response markers; and, second, the six signs serve as narratorial mediators, representing the dramatic equivalents of third-person narrators in prose fiction.


PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT
The main objective of this study is to explore the extent to which the ideological point of view in Amiri Baraka's Slave Ship (1967) has been communicated by six oppositional signs at the visual (darkness versus light), audible (loud/hard music versus low/soft music), and vocalic (scream versus laughter) semiotic resources. The paper uses a social semiotic approach to discuss the six signs' semiotic potential for making meaning. The current study is anticipated to contribute to what is called "oppositional semiotics," as it highlights the way semiotic paradoxes created by oppositional signs contribute to the meaningmaking process as well as the way oppositional signs motivate a cognitive activity that directs readers/audience towards a specific semiotic interpretation, sustaining the ideological viewpoint intended by the signs' users.

Introduction
In Graumann's (1992) words, the position adopted by writers concerning a specific topic is called "point of view" (also, "viewpoint"), which constitutes the attitudinal message of the writer, be it ideological, social, psychological, political, or otherwise. Whereas many linguists and stylisticians have, in general, paid particular attention to discuss point of view in narrative genres, i.e. prose fiction (e.g., Chatman, 1990;Simpson, 1993), a few have been particularly concerned with the study of the concept in other literary genres, specifically drama (e.g., Jeffries, 2000;McIntyre, 2004). The scarcity of linguistic research on point of view in the conversational genre is due to two reasons: first, drama texts usually lack the level of narration (Elam, 1980;McIntyre, 2006;Richardson, 1988) through which different types of viewpoints are conveyed; and, second, point of view is characterized by its "narratological" nature, which drama texts usually lack (McIntyre, 2006, p. 3). Such a narrative role, on the other hand, is often represented in the narrative genres. Here lies the rationale beyond the current study, as it explores the extent to which ideological viewpoint is communicated by a number of oppositional signs: visual (darkness versus light), audible (loud/hard music versus low/soft music); and vocalic (scream versus laughter) in Amiri Baraka's (1967) Slave Ship. More specifically, this paper offers a social semiotic analysis of the six signs to shed light on the way they encode meaning and operate as conduits of the ideological viewpoint in the selected play.
Communicating viewpoints is not confined to the dialogue between discourse participants, either at the intradiegetic (character-to-character) or extradiegetic (author-to-reader/audience) levels of communication; however, other theatrical components are essential in this regard. Among these elements are the setting, the gestures, the voice inflection of the actors, and "a multitude of other signs," including audible, visual and vocalic signs (Esslin, 1987, p. 16). Being one fundamental element in drama, setting refers not only to the non-linguistic context that encircles any act of communication, but also to "the assumptions and beliefs that people bring to discourse" (Simpson, 1997, p. 135). Within its different representations in discourse, setting serves as a meaning/ideology generator (Fischer-Lichte, 1992) that contributes to the interpretation of drama texts. Baraka's Slave Ship is no exception; the play is rich with its visual, audible, and vocalic setting that characterizes the process of communication at the characterto-character and author-to-reader levels of discourse. These different dimensions of setting are semiotically staged to convey the ideological viewpoint beyond the play: the blacks' suffering and marginality and the necessity of revolution. Thus, it is not only words that are ideology-laden carriers of viewpoints, but also all the elements a playwright uses can have ideologically semiotic potential, i.e. their potential for making meaning. This is why theatrical performance always has precedence in producing signs that contribute significantly to the interpretation of drama texts. Such a meaning-/ideology-making process is the core concern of social semiotics.
The paper seeks to answer three research questions. First, what is the ideological viewpoint Baraka attempts to convey in Slave Ship? Second, to what extent does Baraka manage to use oppositional signs to communicate his ideological viewpoint and to obtain a specific meaning effect? Third, how does Baraka limit the point of view within the play to the extent that he allows his readers/audience to grasp it from a semiotic angle? The answer to these research questions constitutes the main objective of this study: to explore the extent to which the ideological viewpoint in Baraka's Slave Ship has been semiotically communicated by a number of oppositional signs at the visual, audible, and vocalic semiotic resources. This objective is pursued within two theoretical strands: the social semiotic approach (Hodge & Kress, 1988;Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001;van Leeuwen, 2005), and Short's (1996) checklist of linguistic indicators of viewpoint. The adopted analytical framework serves to mirror the complementary relationship between the contextual semiotic resources: the visual (sight), the audible (sound), and the vocalic (prosody); and the textual semiotic resources manifested typographically in words. It also accentuates the fact that social semiotics is entirely concerned with the way language and "modes of communication other than language" are incorporated into the stylistic analysis of fictional texts in general and into the meaning-making process in particular (Caldas-Coulthard & van Leeuwen, 2003, p. 3).
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 is a review of literature, which offers an account of traditional and social semiotics; semiotic opposition; a social semiotic approach to the study of the visual, audible, and vocalic signs under investigation; and Short's checklist of the linguistic indicators of viewpoint. Section 3 is the methodology, which presents the data collection and description as well as the procedural steps adopted in the analysis of the selected data. Section 4 provides a social semiotic analysis of the six signs at hand, by exploring the extent to which these signs are employed as ideology carriers in Baraka's Slave Ship. Section 5 discusses the findings of the study. Section 6 concludes the paper and recommends some ideas for further research.

From semiotics to social semiotics
The first steps taken towards theorizing the tenets of modern semiotics were conducted by Ferdinand de Saussure (1916 and Charles Peirce (1931Peirce ( /1958, who discussed the concept from different perspectives. De Saussure focuses on the linguistic dimension of the sign, whereas Peirce is concerned with the pragmatic dimension of the term, that is, its function in relation to its representation, signification, and meaning. De Saussure's (1959, p. 16) "semiology" is a science that studies "the life of signs within society" and shows "what constitutes signs" and "what laws govern them." For him, each sign consists of two main parts: signifier and signified, whose relationship is "arbitrary in nature" (de Saussure, 1959, p. 78). From a Peircean perspective, the sign "is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity." A sign, for Peirce, consists of three interrelated elements: a representamen, an object and an interpretant that target one goal: sign's signification. A sign, therefore, is logically meaningful when its relation to what it stands for is interpreted. Both de Saussure and Peirce emphasize the crucial role of signs as meaning mediators. Such a meaning-making process is the core concern of social semiotics (Halliday, 1978;Hodge, 2009;Hodge & Kress, 1988;Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001;van Leeuwen, 2001). Grounding on de Saussure's and Peirce's founding insights, social semiotics extends the traditional theory of semiotics towards the exploration of the way human processes of representation, interpretation, and signification contribute to shaping and/or reshaping both individuals and societies, with a special focus on the way semiotic systems are shaped by ideologies and social interests pertaining to language users (van Leeuwen, 2005).
Social semiotics was firstly introduced by Halliday's (1978) Language as Social Semiotic, in which he proposes that the semiotic resources of language are shaped by the way language users employ them to make meaning. According to Halliday (1978, p. 39), any language is developed as a system of "meaning potential," constituting a group of resources that affects the way speakers/writers use language within specific social contexts. Any sign, for Halliday, has three meta-functions: ideational, whose function is to express something about the world; interpersonal, which serves to place people in relation to each other; and textual, which highlights the way a sign is associated with other signs to make texts coherent (Halliday, 1978). Halliday's social semiotic view of language was adopted and then developed by Hodge and Kress (1988), who discuss the way semiotic resources are employed in everyday life to communicate specific meanings by associating the concept with the context as a crucial partner in the interpretation of the various semiotic resources. In this regard, Hodge and Kress (1988) argue that context goes beyond the dimension of verbal language, or the extension of other texts, towards further semiotic codes and modes that serve as meaning mediators in discourse. Accordingly, numerous studies use the social semiotic approach to discuss the visual mode of semiotic resources (e.g., Aiello, 2021;Pauwels, 2021;Skrede & Andersen, 2022;Zieba, 2020), the audible mode (e.g., Moodley, 2020;Navickaitė-Martinelli, 2015;Reed, 2020), and the vocalic mode (e.g., Bonaccio et al., 2016;Holt, 2011;Shuwen, 2018). These studies discuss the semiotic potential of the visual, audible and vocalic resources in communicating meanings and ideologies.
Van Leeuwen (2005) argues that the focus in social semiotics is shifted from the "sign" to the "semiotic resources" language users design and use not only to produce specific communicative artifacts, but also to interpret them within the social context; semiotic resources are vehicles people use to make meaning (Hodge & Kress, 1988). For van Leeuwen (2005, p. 285), semiotic resources are "the actions, materials and artifacts we use for communicative purposes" and "have a meaning potential, based on their past uses, and a set of affordances based on their possible uses." Crucially, there is a relationship between semiotic resources, social practices, and discursive situations; such a connection makes Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) conclude that "all social action is semiotic, and all semiotic action is social." Van Leeuwen (2005) maintains that social semiotics is not only confined to the description of the various semiotic modes, i.e. visually, audibly and vocalically, but rather it is concerned with the way language users regulate the use of the different semiotic resources within the context of specific social and institutional practices. Social semiotics is a practice-oriented approach of analysis that enables us to open "our eyes and ears and other senses for the richness and complexity of semiotic production and interpretation, and to social intervention, to the discovery of new semiotic resources and new ways of using existing semiotic resources" (van Leeuwen, 2005, p. xi, emphasis mine). De Saussure (1916 was the first to introduce the concept of opposition, which he also termed as différence, as a basic principle of linguistic structure and a key concept in structuralist semiotics. From a Saussurean perspective, différence is the origin of semiotic structure. That is, only by making reference to all other system structures from which the particular element varies can any semiotic element's value be determined (de Saussure, 1916(de Saussure, /1959 . The concept of opposition was developed by the Prague School linguists as a theory that was used in the analysis of natural languages and was later broadened to include research on a variety of expressive phenomena, including textual and visual art as well as discourse and narrative structures (Elšík & Matras, 2006). The theory was firstly formalized in terms of the distinctive features manifested in the phonemic opposition (e.g., ±voice) and the conceptual opposition (e.g., ±human). The opposition theory was also used by Greimas (1987) to introduce what he termed the semiotic square, a tool used in structural analysis of the relationships between semiotic signs through the opposition of concepts. For Greimas (1987), the semiotic square represents the fundamental structure of signification in which any semantic term (sign) entails its opposite. For example, the meaning of the signs "life" and "light" is understood in relation to their opposite signs "death" and "darkness" and, by association, their significations are perceived in relation to the significations of their opposites. This type of semiotic opposition allows for a more in-depth understanding of the sign's nature, not only in terms of its ability to make meaning, but also in terms of the significations evoked by its polar opposite. Assaf et al. (2015) argue that opposition theory advocates the idea that binary oppositions (e.g., dark vs. light) trigger indispensable cognitive and linguistic processes that represent one of the fundamental tenets of structuralism. According to Paradis et al. (2009), the meaning of binary oppositional signs is negotiated in the context where they occur. This means that the contextual environment wherein oppositional signs are employed contributes significantly to shaping the meaning potential pertaining to them. This, in turn, makes us claim that the contextual weight of oppositional signs, i.e., their flexibility to allow more significations according to the surrounding circumstances in which they occur, is determined by the extent to which they are used within particular settings (i.e., the way they are staged or represented in discourse) to trigger particular meanings, be they ideological, social, political, or otherwise. For example, within specific discourse contexts, the two oppositional signs "dark" and "light" entail a further range of related meanings, such as transparency, illumination, victory, and directness; and opacity, fear, submission, and inscrutability, respectively. Thus, the particular contextualization of the oppositional signs in discourse functions to cognitively summon further significations usually associated with the meaning (ideology) targeted by the sign's user. This incessant process of meaning-making tunes with Derrida's (1978) argument that signs' meaning can never be final; however, it is differential and is usually arrived at by referring to other words opposite to them.

A social semiotic approach to the study of visual, audible, and vocalic signs
According to Aiello (2020, p. 373), a social semiotic analysis of visual signs is mainly concerned with the way these visual resources are employed in texts in order to communicate a range of meaning potentials. A semiotic approach to the analysis of visual signs does not only focus on what Rose (2016) terms "the site of the image" but also necessitates a focus on the contextual environment of the visual sign in terms of its production and reception, namely the cultural and social contexts in which a visual sign is made and consumed. Social semiotics, therefore, perceives meaning-making as a process that is shaped and reshaped by social structures and cultural norms.
Perceiving semiology as one part of linguistics, Barthes (1968) differentiates two levels of signification pertaining to visual signs: denotative (or first-order meaning) and connotative (second-order meaning). The former, for him, refers to the immediate impact the visual sign causes, or the meanings one arrives at without the interference of any of the cultural or ideological concerns, whereas the latter constitutes the cultural meanings the sign invites, or the meanings whose interpretant is shaped by the culture and/or ideology of the interpreter. For Barthes (1968), ideology encompasses the use of signifiers to express and justify the principal values of a given society, class or historical period. Barthes's perspective is also supported by Curtin's (2006) argument that the significance of visual signs is understood not only from the individual, but also from the tripartite relationship held between the individual, the visual image and culture and society. Such a relationship, Eco (1976, p. 16) argues, is manifested in the sign and in what he terms "something else," which results from what culture and society have taught us. Thus, the cultural background exhibits a crucial role in the understanding of the nature of any social semiotic resource (Feng & O'Halloran, 2013). Curtin (2006, p. 55) maintains that visual signs "have often been thought of as more direct and straightforward in their meaning than language itself," and, therefore, they are text-like and are linked with particular meanings. Barthes (1968), however, argues that it is difficult to attribute meanings to visual signs without a combination of specific elements that direct the semiotic wheel towards particular significations. This anticipated combination may be textual and/or contextual; that is, a visual sign has more semiotic weight if it is produced with an accompanying text.
Van Leeuwen (2005, p. 93) postulates that "we can communicate not only with our voice but also with musical instruments," which accentuates the significance of music as a material resource for communicating meaning. Music is "a form of social interaction" (van Leeuwen, 2012, p. 322) that can foster relations of power and solidarity, and it has the power to "unite people and create group feelings" (Machin & Richardson, 2012). According to van Leeuwen (2012, p. 325), "music fuses ideological meaning and emotion, and it is precisely therein that its power lies." As such, music, van Leeuwen maintains, should be studied as discourse because it has always been perceived as an integral part of every human society because it can express the different values of political, social, and religious institutions. Similarly, the same interaction function of music has been emphasized by Navickaitė-Martinelli (2015, p. 741), who postulates that "musical performance is understood as a communication model," in which a number of coded messages are encoded or enacted, and a number of meanings are received or decoded. In theatre, meanings and ideologies can be encoded and transmitted by various systems of staging, including music (Machin & Richardson, 2012). Consequently, a musical performance in drama texts has signification that can be interpretatively decoded by looking at the contextual atmosphere in which such a performance is delivered, as well as the different communication processes operating within the speech event wherein the dramatic dialogue is presented.
Numerous studies have approached the semiotic potential of music in communicating various ideological meanings. These include reviewing some theories of signification and communicative practices pertinent to music (Inskip et al., 2008); exploring the way social semiotics contributes to the analysis of film music (Griffith & Machin, 2014); probing the way musical auditory scenes have the potential to create perceptual inferences of meaning pertaining to the different events around us (Bregman, 1994); approaching sounds as signification carriers and meaning units (Ihde, 2007); investigating the way sign understanding can be shifted from the visual codes to the auditory ones by what is termed "transcodification" in radio drama (Crisell, 1994, p. 146); explaining the sexual subjectivity regulated by gendered discourses in songs (Moodley, 2020); and discussing music as a communicative multimodal discourse employed to articulate ideological discourses in society (McKerrell & Way, 2017). Music can also be a revolutionary stimulator and a challenge power in politics. This political role of music has been emphasized by McKerrell (2012), who highlights the significant part played by music within politics. Controvertibly, most musicologists refuse to perceive music as a type of discourse that carries meanings. The music semiotician Nattiez (1971, p. 8), for example, points out that music is and should remain autonomous and abstract because it "signifies nothing" in itself. However, other studies adopt the opposite direction and highlight the contribution of music in communicating meanings and encoding ideologies (e.g., Hodge et al., 2019;Strom, 2016). Van Leeuwen (2012, p. 320) also argues that "musical signifiers, aspects of melody, harmony, musical structure, rhythm and timbre, can be convincingly linked to social meaning potentials in ways that can help us analyze both the hegemonic ideological work and the counter-hegemonic work of music in society." Such musical signifiers as well as the social contexts wherein they were employed have previously been discussed by Cooke (1959), who connects the different types of melodies and the meanings they channel to listeners, by arguing that ascending melodies are active and dynamic and are always characterized by rising pitches, that is why they are employed to energize people and allay them behind a specific cause, whereas descending melodies are characterized by falling pitches and, therefore, are passive and inward-looking. Bonaccio et al. (2016) point out that vocalic signs are meaning-making carriers. For them, the way words are produced, including the level of pitch, intonation, accent, etc., affects the perception of discourse. Not only this, Ko et al. (2015) further argue that, sometimes, vocal signs are indicators of speakers' hierarchy, by which addressees can infer the hierarchical status of speakers. Thus, different hierarchical relationships can be practiced by means of different forms of vocalics. Other studies (e.g., Burgoon & Dunbar, 2006;Tracy et al., 2013) have previously emphasized the importance of vocalics not only in reflecting power relations but also in indicating submission reactions of discourse participants.
Laughing and screaming are non-lexical components in the interaction process. According to O'Donnell-Trujillo and Adams (1983, p. 175), laughing and screaming cannot be perceived as linguistic constructions, but as "acoustic" constructions that do not carry any syntactic or semantic features. Despite the fact that the ordinary pragmatic function of both laughing and screaming constitutes a response to humorous and/or calamitous events (Glenn, 2003, p. 24), it is pragmatically inappropriate to confine them to such a narrow scope of communicative purpose, that is, as simply a reaction to the perception of ecstasy or agony. Holt (2011), for example, argues that laughter is not only a reaction to a particular humorous situation, but also an action in itself; it is intentionally produced to cope with face-threatening aspects of disagreement. Laughter can also be produced to communicate power, despise, sarcasm, condescension, and disdain. In the same vein, screaming is not merely a reaction to excruciating, distressful, and grievous events. However, in many communicative situations, screaming expresses a case of helplessness and mirrors a feeling of oppression. Within the scope of the current study, both laughter and scream, being auditory signs in the discourse of Slave Ship, are perceived as meaning-carriers representing the ideological viewpoint of the writer.

Point of view
The term "point of view" or "viewpoint" refers to the way in which a story's representation (staging) is influenced by the attitudes and values of the narrator, the character, and/or the author (Niederhoff, 2009); or, in other words, the point of position through which the events of a story are presented and viewed (Wales, 1989). In literature, other equivalents of the term have been used by scholars, including "perspective," which means approaching a piece of action from a "single point of view" (Carter, 1970, p. 840); "focalization" (Genette, 1980); and "interest-focus" (Chatman, 1990). Such a position or stance, through which viewpoint is communicated, necessitates the selection of a particular mode of language, verbal and/or nonverbal, in the presentation of discourse, which, in turn, serves to determine the ideological meaning embodied therein.
Point of view has different levels or planes constituting the attitudes, stances, and judgments of the narrator towards the narrated. These include: (i) the psychological plane, which is concerned with the thoughts and emotions of the narrator or the characters, and refers to the way in which the events of a story are "mediated through the consciousness of the teller of the story" (Simpson, 1993, p. 11); (ii) the phraseological plane, which constitutes the way authors use various diction to describe different characters or where they make use of one form or another of reported or substituted speech in their description (Uspensky, 1973, p. 17); (iii) the perceptual plane, which refers to the focalizer's sensory range (sight, hearing, smell) and is determined by two main coordinates, space and time (Rimmon-Kenan, 1983, p. 77); and (iv) the ideological plane (also called "conceptual plane" (McIntyre, 2006), which is concerned with the process of viewing the world conceptually (Uspensky, 1973, p. 8). For Scholes and Kellogg (1966), point of view, irrespective of its type, controls the reader's impression of everything else. Such a dominant nature of point of view over readers is also accentuated by Booth's (1961Booth's ( /1983 contention that ethical and ideological attitudes and values encoded by a point of view serve to motivate the interpretation process of texts. According to Fowler (1996a), the ideological point of view constitutes the various attitudes, beliefs and values a person has, as well as the categories by which (s)he visualizes the world. It is not only "the narrative voice or the character" (McIntyre, 2006) that can be the vehicle of the ideological point of view; the author (via stage directions) and the setting are fundamental carriers of ideological viewpoints. According to McIntyre (2004), Chatman's (1990) conceptual point of view is wider and more general in scope than Fowler's ideological point of view, although the two terms are used as variants for each other. This, for McIntyre (2004, p. 145), is related to the fact that Fowler's perspective is mainly concerned with "socio-political beliefs," whereas Chatman's category is used to "describe our numerous figurative conceptions and judgments of the world, and our way of conceptualizing the world and our position within it." Crucially, it is for such a difference that McIntyre prefers to use Chatman's term (i.e. conceptual point of view) in his analysis of Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle (2004), as he perceives Chatman's term to incorporate Fowler's perspective. Short (1996) proposed a number of linguistic indicators through which authors can control the way they present their point of view in discourse. Despite the fact that Short's categories are firstly dedicated to studying viewpoints in prose fiction, they prove useful in communicating viewpoints in drama texts. In fact, some of Short's linguistic indicators can be applied to the study of point of view in drama because they address pragmatic aspects pertinent to the discourse levels in drama, particularly his value-laden language indicator. Short's (1996, pp. 264-27) checklist includes the following indicators: (i) schema-oriented language, (ii) value-laden expressions, (iii) given versus new information, (iv) indicators of a particular character's thoughts or perceptions, (v) deixes, (vi) social deixes, (vii) the sequencing and organization of actions and events to indicate viewpoint, and (viii) ideological view point. For analytical reasons pertaining to the relevance of specific indicators to the text under investigation, only the second linguistic indicator from the aforementioned list will be used in the analysis of the selected play: the use of value-laden expressions. This indicator (i.e. value-laden language) is concerned with highlighting the linguistic expressions used by writers to evaluate the situations and events that occur in texts. For McIntyre (2006), this evaluative language is indicative in reflecting viewpoints in texts, and is more pertinent to Uspensky's (1973) and Fowler's (1996a) ideological point of view, which is also a variant of Chatman's (1990) conceptual point of view. McIntyre (2006) goes on to argue that value-laden expressions can be used in texts at the character-to-character level of discourse (via the characters' dialogue) and the author-to-reader level of discourse (via stage directions). In both cases, the use of "value-laden or ideologically slanted expressions" (Short, 1996, p. 286) remains an indicative indicator of viewpoints in literary genres.

Data: Collection, description and rationale
The research data constitutes Amiri Barak's Slave Ship, a one-act play written in 1967. The play exhibits a fabulous usage of musical setting and sensorial signs, including visual, audible, and vocalic ones associated with the dramatic events and mirroring the blacks' suffering and marginality. The dialogue of the play is presented in two levels of communication: the character-tocharacter level, manifested in the conversational turns and dramatically encompasses two discourse participants: blacks and whites; and the author-to-reader level, represented by the comments parenthetically communicated via stage directions in many parts of the play.
Slave Ship represents Baraka's vision of a revolutionary black theater which, for him, "should wake us from the dead of the blunted sense" (Baraka, 2009, p. 142). The play traces the history of the African Americans by depicting the unrelenting gruesomeness and hideous suffering the African Americans lead. Although the play ends with the triumphant victory of African Americans over the oppressive power of the whites, it calls for a revolutionary act to break out of the prison of slavery (Kumar, 2009). Such deteriorating conditions as well as revolutionary spirit have been staged to reflect the ideological viewpoint beyond the play. The play depicts the clash between blacks and whites in a dramatic atmosphere, wherein theatrical events are incorporated into both music and dance. The play is characterized by its sensorial theatrical elements presented in three semiotic modes: visual (darkness versus light), audible (loud/hard music versus low/soft music), and vocalic (scream versus laughter). These semiotic resources are schematized, dramatically and semiotically, to serve as conduits for the ideological viewpoint in the play.
Three reasons comprise the rationale for selecting Slave Ship in particular. First, the play abounds in oppositional signs interwoven in the dialogue of the play as semiotic carriers of the writer's ideological viewpoint. Second, the semiotic representation of the ideological viewpoint in Salve Ship is sustained by a rich ideology-laden lexis, particularly at the author-to-reader level of discourse. Third, and most indicative, there is a remarkable linguistic and paralinguistic compatibility between the macropropositions of the play, i.e. its global meanings, and the various signs dramatized to reveal the way ideological viewpoint is semiotically staged in the play.

Procedures
The methodological procedures adopted in the analysis encompass two analytical stages, both of which revolve around the semiotic analysis of the selected semiotic resources. In the first stage, the six signs under investigation were identified in terms of their semiotic contexts as well as their significations reflecting the ideological viewpoint in the play. The second stage involves two steps. First, showing the link between the selected signs and the targeted ideological viewpoint by shedding light on both the textual facets and the contextual cues that clarify the way the selected signs were integrated with other linguistic elements to convey the ideological viewpoint in the play-text. Second, demonstrating the way the ideological viewpoint can be semiotically communicated in the different stages of discourse representations. The emphasis in the various procedural stages is twofold: highlighting the semiotic relationship between each semiotic resource and its interpretant, i.e. the meanings it evokes in the minds of readers/audience, and demonstrating how Baraka's ideological viewpoint is semiotically communicated throughout the play-text.

The visual semiotic resource: Darkness versus light
The use of the oppositional visual signs darkness and light as carriers of the ideological point of view dominates a large space of Baraka's Slave Ship. Throughout the events of the play-text, darkness and light are employed to communicate the blacks' suffering and marginality and the necessity of revolution. The semiotic potentialities these oppositional signs afford mirror the way social semiotics focuses on the howness of communication, i.e. how signs are used to produce meaning and communicate ideologies. In the opening scene of the play, readers are parenthetically told that the (whole theater in darkness. Dark. For a long time. Just dark) (Slave Ship, henceforth SS., p. 132). The theatre is visually dark to represent the narrator's account of the darkness of the ship hold, as well as to make readers/audience predict what will follow. The sign darkness, therefore, operates as an action predictor. That is, the initial semiotic staging represented in the darkness that dominates the whole theatre represents what Baraka calls the "atmosfeeling" (SS., p. 132) of life in the hold of a Slave Ship, as well as the suffering of the marginalized enslaved Africans. This skillful dramatic staging is also a semiotic foregrounding for what follows in the drama.
The semiotic initiating move represented by the whole theatre being in complete darkness serves to motivate a cognitive response on the part of readers/audience, which, in turn, functions to stimulate their stored knowledge to reconcile with the schematic assumptions they cognitively have concerning the visual sign darkness. Through the employment of the visual resource darkness, Baraka intends to create a feeling of a calamitous condition and immense human suffering. This signification pertaining to the sign darkness is accentuated by other relevant semiotic cues, such as the "incense . . . dirt/filth smells/bodies," the sounds of "heavy chains," "guns and cartridges," as well as "whips/whip sounds" (SS., p. 132). Here, Baraka manages not only to employ various sensorial signs to convey his ideological viewpoint, but also to provide relevant semiotic cues to ensure that readers/audience understand the sign's connotative meaning effectively.
The visual sign darkness is also used as a suffering signal. This is clearly shown in various dramatic situations wherein the blacks suffer the atrocities of slavery: In the above extracts, the sign darkness is associated with situations of suffering and marginality. This is communicated by the prosodic letters indicating blacks' agonizing situation, as well as by the image of black men, women and children being ached in the darkness and jammed together while chained and monitored by white men carrying whips. The textual association of the suffering-oriented expressions with the state of complete darkness that hangs over the dramatic scenes serves to create a semiotic correlation between the sign darkness and the blacks' suffering. Such a complementary semiotic relationship between text and visual signs is emphasized by Barthes's (1968) argument that text usually anchors the meaning of visual signs by helping readers identify the meaning intended by the sign user.
The visual sign light, on the other hand, is semiotically staged as a carrier of Baraka's ideological viewpoint by operating as a highlighter of not only oppressors but also traitors. The first situation in which the sign light is employed to highlight oppressors comes early in the play, particularly after the long laughter of the whites when they seize their "cargo of black gold" (SS., p. 133). At this specific point, Baraka  In all four situations, the visual sign light is utilized to highlight the traitor, old Tom, who accepted submission and humiliation quite willingly and allied with the whites against his comrades just for flimsy gains: "Now can I have dat extra chop you promised me?" (SS., p. 139). The last scene of the play witnesses further semiotic purposes of the two oppositional visual signs, wherein the sign darkness functions as an action motivator and a situation commentator, and the sign light serves as an indicator of the end of suffering and the necessity of the blacks' union. Significantly, in this last scene, the visual sign darkness is semiotically augmented by its synonymous black (one of the cognitively summoned significations of the sign darkness). This is reflected in the last stage direction of the play: (Lights come up abruptly, and people on stage begin to dance, same hip Boogalooyoruba, fingerpop, skate, monkey, dog . . . Enter audience; get members of audience to dance. To same music Rise Up. Turns into an actual party. When the party reaches some loose improvisation, et cetera, audience relaxed, somebody throws the preacher's head into center of floor, that is, after dancing starts for real. Then black). (SS.,p. 145) Here, Baraka's ideological viewpoint concerning the necessity of revolution is communicated by the two oppositional visual signs light and black. This last scene can also be perceived as a reference to the necessity of using violence in revolution. Such a violent revolution, which Baraka calls for, is one of the principles of the Black Arts Movement, which he established in 1965 to call for using weapons for selfdefense (Bressler, 2011). Crucially, the reciprocal semiotic role Baraka uses at the end of the play emphasizes the semiotic role played by the two visual signs in conveying the writer's ideological viewpoint. The sign light, which is also used throughout the play to highlight the oppressors, is semiotically shifted to mark the end of the tyrant and, thus, the end of marginalization and suffering. This signification is clearly conveyed when Baraka tells readers that (lights begin to fade) (SS., p. 145), which is followed by (the finally awful scream of the killed white voice) (SS., p. 145). It is at this point that Baraka uses the synonymous black instead of darkness to indicate that the situation now is in the hands of the blacks. The oppression of the whites is eliminated by the revolution that resulted in the killing of the white man: (all players fixed in half light, at the movement of the act. Then lights go down. Black) (SS., p. 145). The sign light mirrors the victory of the blacks and emphasizes the necessity of the blacks' unity to complete their course in revolting against the different types of oppression. However, to continue as victorious is preconditioned by the blacks' unity. Baraka's last black is a sign that summons various ideological meanings, including the need for further work to attain freedom, the need for unity among the blacks, the importance of the blacks' resistance against oppression, and the necessity of revolution. These different significations constitute the reason why Baraka's darkness is replaced by his last black. Table 1 shows that the two oppositional signs of the visual resource are employed to convey one particular viewpoint, that is, the blacks' suffering, marginality and the necessity of revolution. The semiotic cues are very significant in communicating the targeted ideological viewpoint, as they ensure that the intended meaning (second-order signification) beyond a specific sign comes across effectively to intended recipients. Baraka manages to employ particular semiotic cues in combination with the sign used in order to achieve his ideological message. As such, the contextual environment in which a sign is used, which is featured by relevant semiotic cues, is very important in the meaning-making process. Such a connection between a sign and the context wherein it is used serves to achieve the premeditated meaning of the sign and, therefore, helps understand the ideology intended by the sign user. This correlates with Bowcher's (2018) emphasis on the significant role of context in arriving at sign signification, and also goes in conformity with Berger and Luckmann's (1966) argument that when a sign is utilized in a particular context, it communicates its designed meaning effectively and elicits its intended response on the part of recipients.

The audible semiotic resource: Loud/hard music versus low/soft music
Music "is almost always an interaction" (van Leeuwen, 2005, p. 249). The two oppositional auditory signs loud/hard music and low/soft music have been employed in the discourse of Slave Ship to achieve two semiotic functions. They operate as action motivators and suffering signals, respectively. Throughout the play, music serves as a vehicle for ideological meanings, as it reflects forms of suffering, control, and resistance. This ideological metaphor is employed in combination with the other sensorial signs from the very beginning to delineate the general semiotic atmosphere of the play: The semiotic mixture of the different sensorial signs of darkness, smell, scream and music is an indication of the suffering the blacks lead, particularly with the association of the agonizing vocalizer AAIIEE, which communicates excruciating pain. Throughout the events of the play, the low/soft tone of music, represented by the drums, is associated with the prosodic production of humming and moaning resulting from suffering and oppression. When "the moans and pushed-together agony" occur, and when "young girls afraid they may by violated", readers are told that "drums" are "down low" (SS., p. 135). Again, "the drums beat down, softer" when "humming starts . . . like old black women humming for three centuries in the slow misery of slavery"; "then the drums, softer, then the humming, on and on, in a maddening, building death-patience" (SS., p. 135). It is the same semiotic association that pairs suffering and low/soft music together.
The loud/hard music, on the other hand, operates semiotically as a signal and motivator of resistance and revolution. This signification becomes evident before the end of the play, when the blacks decide to revolt against oppression and tyranny and to end such submissive suffering: (In background, while preacher is frozen in his "Jeff" position, high hard sound of saxophone, backed up by drums, New-sound saxophone tearing up the darkness) (SS., p. 142). Now, the blacks decide "to rise . . . like dead people rising" (SS., p. 142). Such a state of rising manifested in the blacks' revolution against the whites is impeded by "the white man's laughter," who is "trying to drown out the music, but the music is rising" (SS., p. 144). Such a revolutionary signification is semiotically represented by loud music. Obviously, the hard sound of the saxophone is an action motivator that instigates resistance and stimulates the blacks' potential for work. Loud music, here, is a semiotic metaphor for action. Such a signification is dramatically contextualized by two subsequent events: the killing of both the white man and the preacher, and the blacks' collaboration in dancing in the closing scene of the play.
Consequently, music, with all its principal systems, including melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, etc., cannot be perceived to be autonomous and abstract, as argued by Nattiez (1971); however, it is a meaning carrier that communicates viewpoints, expresses different values, and mirrors various identities (van Leeuwen, 2012). This has been emphasized by Dorsey's (2004, p. 61) contention that music is an essential element in generating and motivating political actions. Dorsey maintains that the employment of music to create identification is crucial to the formation of political publics (and the lack thereof). Undoubtedly, in today's politics, music develops its own language and meanings, which get entangled with people's political, social, and cultural experiences. Music does not generate politics, but rather it serves as a vehicle for political meaning. This is how music in Slave Ship is interpreted; it reflects various forms of oppression, domination, and resistance.
Crucially, the melodic system, i.e. the low/soft and loud/hard tones, which Baraka uses in parallel with the dramatic events of the play, can be said to be an attempt to communicatively emphasize specific perceptual inferences for listeners. Fixing such inferences throughout the musical performance in the play serves to create a cognitive activity that directs the semiotic wheel towards a specific ideological interpretation. Using music as a carrier of ideological meanings in the context of Slave Ship, therefore, goes in harmony with Ihde's (2007, p. 147) argument that we should cease to reduce sounds to bare sounds or to mere acoustic tokens; that is, sounds have to be perceived as voices that carry signification. For him, sounds are language. Ihde's argument is predicated on the assumption that we perceive "word(s) as soundful" and "sound(s) as meaningful" (Ihde, 2007, p. 4). Ihde differentiates between language-as-word and language-as-significance, and he attaches music to the latter type. His claim that sounds are usually pregnant with meaning accentuates his contention that sounds (music) are meaning (signification) carriers and their significations constitute "a meaning-in-sound" process, which further highlights their semiotic weight in auditory discourse studies (Ihde, 2007, p. 150, italics in original). Furthermore, the political metaphor the two oppositional audible signs carry in Slave Ship indicates that music has experiential meaning potential and other meanings derived from associating it with political contexts in the real world (van Leeuwen, 1999). Van Leeuwen's words are supported by Street's (2007) argument that music should be incorporated into accounts of political thought and action as a main feature, and not as a footnote or appendage to them. For Street (2007), music not only has the power to influence political behavior and attitudes, but also reflects forms of control and resistance. Baraka, thus, emphasizes the use of music to communicate political and ideological ideas. Further, the rising and falling tones of music throughout the play can be described as "experiential associations" (Arnheim, 1969, p. 117), which refer to the act of connecting the tonal performance of music with the speech event. In Slave Ship, this is realized by the loud/hard versus low/soft tones utilized in accordance with the situations dramatically communicated via the conversations of some characters, or, in most cases, via stage directions. Here, Baraka succeeds in collaborating three things in the play: the dramatic events, the musical performance, and the underlying semiotic meaning; and, thus, harmonizing the semantic propositions of the play with its semiotic message. This harmonious connection is also confirmed by Eco's (1990) emphasis on the necessity of connecting the semantics and the pragmatics of semiotic meanings. Table 2, the two oppositional signs representing the audible semiotic resource have two semiotic functions. First, the loud/hard music is employed as an action motivator that serves to instigate resistance and stimulate potentialities. Second, the low/soft music is utilized to mirror the suffering the blacks have at the hands of the whites. Crucially, it can be said that the musical performance that accompanies the dramatic dialogue in Slave Ship is a pragmatic representation of what Bregman (1994) calls "auditory scene analysis," whose core concern is to create perceptual inferences that are based on a heuristic set of cues, each expressing a type of knowledge in terms of the way the acoustic world usually behaves. Bregman attempts to link the way sounds are created and the way we perceive them in relation to the events around us. The concept of perception here, or our sensitivity to sound, is essential in determining the way our auditory system can build a picture of the world around us (Bregman, 1994). In the context of using the audible resource in this paper, our sensitive perception of the melodies used in combination with the dramatic events serves to establish a pragmatic link between the employed musical performance and the intended ideological viewpoint.

The vocalic semiotic resource: Scream versus laughter
In Slave Ship, Baraka presents two oppositional vocalic resources: scream versus laughter. In more than one situation, there are distressful blacks screaming, crying, humming, and moaning that are counterparted by the laughter of the white men. Baraka employs the vocalic signs scream and laughter as signals of the blacks' suffering and marginality and the whites' apathy, mockery, and arrogance, respectively. He communicates such an ideological viewpoint when he parenthetically tells his readers that (all the women together, scream. AAAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE) (SS., p. 132), and (sounds thrown down into the hold. AAAAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEE. Of people dropped down in the darkness) (SS., p. 132). The vocalic sign scream, represented both typographically and prosodically, is semiotically used to signal the blacks' suffering, oppression, and marginalization. The same meanings of suffering and marginality are also conveyed when readers are told parenthetically that there is a (feeling of people moving around, humbling over each other. Screaming as they try to find a "place" in the bottom of the boat) (SS., p. 134). Such ruthless conditions highlight the meaning of suffering the blacks lead under the dominant whites.
The screams and cries of the oppressed blacks are contrasted with the laughter of the two white characters, Captain and Sailor, who express their happiness that they will be rich due to the cargo of slaves they carry to America: VOICE 1. OK, let's go! A good cargo of black gold. Let's go! We head West! We head West. (Long laughter) Black gold in the West. We got our full cargo. VOICE 2. Aye, Aye, Cap'n. We're on our way. Riches be our, by God. VOICE 1. Aye, riches, riches be ours. We're on our way. America! (Laughter) (SS., p. 133) Such an opposite image between the dejected, oppressed Africans screaming out of suffering and the happy white Americans not only intensifies the meaning of blacks' marginality and suffering, but also communicates the meaning of mockery and apathy on the part of the white Americans. It is a semiotically contradictory staging of the signs scream and laughter, with the former emanating from a fear of the unknown future and the latter from an anticipated hope for an affluently prosperous future. Significantly, in addition to using the vocalic signs of scream as a signal of suffering caused by out-group members, the same vocalic sign is employed to mirror the suffering of the blacks at the hands of the in-group members. This occurs when a black man tries to rape a black woman: (Screams at someone's touch in the dark, grabbing her, trying to drag her in the darkness, press her down against the floor) (SS., p. 136), which is also contrasted with the white character's apathetic laughter: (lights show white men laughing silently, dangling their whips in pantomime, still pointing) (SS., p. 136).
A further manifestation of suffering communicated by the vocalic resource is represented by the agonizing separation of slave families on plantation: (moans . . . the chains, and Black People pushed against each other, struggling for breath and room to live. The Black Man weeps for his woman. The Black Woman weeps for her man together in the darkness, some calling for God.) (SS., p. 136) The above extract presents an audiovisual image wherein the blacks are crammed together, gasping for air, and trying to find a room to breathe and live. The image of the black man and the black woman lamenting over their lost spouses and the darkness that dominates the place, together with (the constant crazy laughter of the sailors) (SS., p. 137) show the extent to which the blacks suffer, and reflect the indelible agony the blacks have due to the separation of their families. The link between the various semiotic resources strengthens the conviction that Baraka's sole concern is to communicate the blacks' state of suffering. This is conducted by integrating signs from various semiotic resources: the audible (moaning/weeping), the visual (darkness), and the vocalic (laughing/screaming/crying) signs. Table 3, the two oppositional vocalic signs scream and laughter are employed as carriers of the ideological viewpoint of the writer. The denotative and connotative levels of signification have been incorporated to mirror the extent to which the blacks suffer. This ideological viewpoint is further strengthened by some semiotic cues that dramatically accompany its semiotic staging in the play. These cues serve to direct the readers' cognition towards the amplification of a specific ideological viewpoint: the suffering and marginality of the blacks and the necessity of revolution.

Value-laden language
In light of Short's (1996) categories of the linguistic indicators of viewpoint, Baraka makes use of the contextual association of particular language that serves to cognitively link between the semiotic staging of his ideological viewpoint and the dramatic dialogue he creates in combination. This is conducted by the employment of value-laden expressions. Value-laden expressions carry the attitudinal beliefs of the writer towards a topic or a communication act. This indicator is clearly represented from the very beginning of the play, where various linguistic expressions are used, particularly via stage directions, to mirror the oppressive atmosphere of the Slave Ship as well as the suffering and marginalization of the blacks. One of the situations in which value-laden expressions are used occurs when the captured blacks on the Slave Ship are described as a "cargo of black gold" (SS., p. 133). Semantically, the word 'cargo', which refers to the goods or merchandise conveyed on a ship for commercial purposes, is very indicative in communicating a specific meaning: the blacks' dehumanized treatment by the whites. The negative connotations conveyed by the lexis 'cargo', particularly when used to refer to human beings, are an obvious indicator that delineates the state of the blacks' suffering Baraka intends to communicate.
Further instances of the employment of the value-laden language can be seen in the introductory stage direction in the first scene. Baraka makes use of some linguistic expressions that serve to direct the cognitive wheel towards one main meaning: the suffering and marginalization of the blacks. Expressions like "people moaning," "people dropped down in the darkness, frightened, angry, mashed together in common terror" (SS., p. 132); "many people jammed together, men, women, children, aching in the darkness. The chains, the whips, magnify the chains and whips"; people "tumbling over each other" (SS., p. 134); and "ladies humming forever in deathly patience" (SS., p. 136). These expressions, in light of Short's (1996) categories of the linguistic indicators of viewpoint, fall within the use of value-laden language. Baraka's ideological viewpoint can be implicated by the negative connotations of the adjectives 'frightened' and 'angry'; the nouns 'darkness ', 'terror', 'chains', 'whips' and 'patience'; the verbs 'moaning', 'dropped down', 'mashed', 'jammed', 'aching', 'tumbling' and 'humming'; and the adverbs 'forever' and 'deathly'. Baraka, therefore, uses different negatively charged lexis at the different levels of the word to semantically trigger the connotative meaning of suffering and marginality. Also, the progressive participles 'moaning ', 'aching', 'tumbling' and 'humming' implicate that the suffering is in progress, which is subsequently emphasized by two things: first, the connection made between 'deathly' and 'patience', which conveys a state of unbearable oppression; and, second, the meaning of permanence communicated by 'forever'.
Significantly, Baraka's employment of the various value-laden expressions to mirror the suffering of the blacks is tuned with Jakobson's (1997, p. 75, italics in original) two basic modes of communication, "selection" and "combination," a process which, for him, allows writers/speakers to maintain certain meanings by selecting and combining particular words that are "semantically cognate." Such semantic correlation can be seen in the negative connotations associated with the above-mentioned expressions. Here, one can notice a tripartite relationship between Baraka's ideological viewpoint, the use of value-laden expressions, and the context of the play. This goes in conformity with van Dijk's (1997) argument that meanings and ideologies targeted in discourse affect the various aspects of discourse structures, including lexical selection. That is, the employment of value-laden language is influenced by the writer's intentionality and, therefore, a relationship between "mental representations" and "linear sequence of words" is realized. Such a relationship is characterized by a "contextual monitoring" of the "textual structures" of discourse, and is considered a "part of a broader pattern of contextualized ideological control of the meaning of text and talk" (van Dijk, 1997, pp. 204-210).
Still, argumentatively, a question may be raised here concerning the connection between the semiotic staging of the ideological viewpoint and the employment of specific words in the discourse of Slave Ship. Based on Fowler's (1996b) assumption that lexis usually carry the ideological beliefs of their users, and Fairclough's (2015) contention that all vocabularies are ideologically-based, together with Voloshinov's (1973) postulation that any linguistic expression that is ideological has a semiotic value, it follows that linguistic signs (i.e. words) can be semiotically predicated on specific ideological meanings in discourse. Accordingly, discussing the ideological significance of words as one way of the semiotic staging of the ideological viewpoint contributes significantly to the semiotic interpretation of discourse. Further, signs, according to Eco (1976), are open to a variety of meanings that differ according to the contextual environment in which they are produced and/or used. Such a multiplicity of meanings pertaining to linguistic signs is a result of what O'Halloran (2003, p. 10) calls "the activity of reading a text," which, for him, refers to the ability to understand the sign by linking it to the context wherein it occurs. Such a contextual connection between linguistic signs (words) and the context wherein they are used is highly representative in Baraka's Slave Ship. The connection between the value-laden words used at the author-to-reader level of communication and the semiotic staging manifested in the six oppositional signs clarifies the extent to which the meanings of these linguistic signs can be intelligibly and inferably perceived in line with the dexterous employment of the semiotic context in which they are staged.
Importantly, decoding the meaning intended by the writer is crucial in any communication act because "communication is successful not when hearers recognize the linguistic meaning of the utterance, but when they infer the speaker's meaning from it" (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, p. 23). Thus, it can be said that Baraka's ideological viewpoint is successfully communicated via complementary processes of textualization (the use of ideology-laden lexis) and contextualization (the use of schema-laden signs) that are entirely based on a skillful semiotic staging of discourse, both at the character-to-character and author-to-reader levels of communication. Crucially, Baraka's ability to textualize and contextualize the ideology-laden words/phrases ("linguistic signs" in the context of this paper) emphasizes Hodge and Kress's (1988, p. 16) argument that words within discourse are perceived in terms of two features: value and signification, where the former refers to their textual position in discourse and the latter comprises the various meanings associated with the word within various contexts and brought to discourse by the different discourse participants, with their different cognitive backgrounds. Such background knowledge serves to enrich the notion of readership in order for readers to be "discursively equipped, prior to the encounter with the text" (Fowler, 1996b, p. 7). Interestingly, this textual-contextual process of the semiotic staging of the ideological viewpoint is comparably analogous to Chatman's (1978) two categories of viewpoint, namely perceptual and conceptual, where the former refers to the viewpoint maintained by the perception of discourse participants, including visual, audible, vocalic, etc. perception; and the latter constitutes the viewpoint maintained by the participants' cognitive world, i.e. by what they cognitively bring to discourse in terms of the meaning potential of signs (words). This point becomes perspicuously evident when we consider the connection between the semiotic contextualization maintained by the employment of the six oppositional signs presented in the play (directly related to perception) and the semiotic textualization conducted by the use of the value-laden language (closely ascribed to conception). This, of course, highlights the complementary relationship between the textual and contextual staging of linguistic signs as well as between the value and the signification pertaining to them.

Findings and discussion
The analysis shows that through the dexterous use of oppositional signs at the visual, audible, and vocalic semiotic resources, Baraka manages to present his ideological viewpoint. This is conducted by a semiotic staging process that continues throughout the play's events. He uses the six signs as ideology containers that serve to create a semiotic context contributing to the whole interpretative picture of the play. Such an ideological weight of the oppositional signs interwoven within the dramatic dialogue of the play goes in conformity with what Keane (2018, pp. 65-66) calls "semiotic ideology," which refers to the assumptions people have concerning the nature of signs, their functions, and the consequences they communicate when used. For Keane, semiotic ideology goes beyond the mere expression of linguistic forms and "directs attention to the full range of possible sign vehicles and the sensory modalities they might engage, including sound, smell, touch, muscular movement, pain, affect, and other somatic phenomena." In this sense, semiotic ideology is concerned with "the raw affordances of signs," which, in turn, affect the interpretation of signs' meaning. In Slave Ship, Baraka adopts a semiotic "angle of telling" (Simpson, 1993, p. 2) or "a telling mode of presentation" (Locher & Jucker, 2021, p. 127), to communicate his ideological point of view: blacks' suffering and marginality in a white society and the necessity of revolution. Such an angle of telling, for Fillmore (1981), is a particular orientation of the manner through which discourse events are initially presented. It is through such a vision that Baraka allows his readers/audience to envision the events of the play from one particular viewpoint. Fillmore's claims of initial presentation are significantly linked with the concept of thematic organization of discourse (Brown & Yule, 1983, p. 143), through which writers "provide a structural framework for their discourse, which relates back to their main intention and provides a perspective on what follows."

The six oppositional signs in Baraka's Slave Ship are narratorial mediators and multidimensional carriers of the ideological point of view
The analysis of Baraka's Slave Ship shows that the six oppositional signs under investigation fulfill in part the role played by narrators in fictional discourse, particularly in the narrative genres. This narratological effect can easily be realized in both the reading and performance of the play. The visual, auditory, and vocalic signs function as contact codes that clearly tell what the goings-on on the stage is, and mirror what the words on pages communicate; in both cases, the six oppositional signs are conduits of the writer's ideological point of view. Significantly, drama texts, unlike prose, do not need narrators, in the ordinary sense of the word, to be a fertile soil for discussions on the topic of point of view (McIntyre, 2004(McIntyre, , 2006. Dram texts lack the concept of narratorial mediation (Elam, 1980), and point of view is not considered a mere narratological issue traced in drama texts (Richardson, 1988). However, the notion of point of view can be successfully discussed in dramatic texts, and the role of narratology can be adequately conducted by means other than a character or a writer. In this study, this role is realized by virtue of particular visual, auditory, and vocalic signs that trigger a specific effect on the part of readers/audience. Thus, drama texts can be said to present a type of linguistic narratology that can counterpart traditional narratology in prose. What I mean here by 'linguistic' is the devices that demonstrate narrative aspects of the texts without being narrated, that is, without literal authorial mediation. Such a linguistic dimension of narratology can be seized at the linguistic and paralinguistic levels of discourse; it can be communicated verbally, non-verbally, and/or prosodically. Such a traditional narratological relinquishment in drama texts has been accentuated by McIntyre (2006, p. 3), who argues that some drama texts, categorized as "prototypical" and do not have narrators, exhibit narrative aspects reflected by, for example, stage directions. Consequently, the semiotic approach adopted here to the study of point of view in Baraka's play demonstrates that the six signs investigated here are narratorial mediation semiotic devices. Further, the analysis demonstrates that the signs darkness, light, scream, laughter, loud/hard music, and low/soft music are multidimensional carriers of Baraka's ideological viewpoint. They are action predictors and motivators, suffering signals, suffering-source highlighters, apathy and arrogance indicators, situation commentators, and call-response markers. Through the deft semiotic staging of the six oppositional signs, Baraka reincarnates the role of a third-person narrator by providing a significant foregrounding for his ideological viewpoint as well as the intended dramatic message to come. Baraka's ability to make the audience see, hear and smell the performers serves to position them in a frame of responsibility for and complicity in the action (Duggan, 2007).

Schema-laden language and schema-laden signs: When the textual is semiotically incorporated into the contextual
It is analytically evidenced that the ideological viewpoint in Slave Ship communicated by the six oppositional signs has also been reinforced and evidenced through further textual cues. The temporal and spatial connections Baraka makes between the visual, audible and vocalic signs from one part and the text of the play (language at the character-to-character and author-toreader levels of communication) offer strong evidence for the way textual analysis collaborates with setting elements in presenting the ideological point of view semiotically. This textualcontextual integration, by association with Short's (1996) schema-laden language, indicates that schema-laden signs significantly contribute to the semiotic understanding and interpretation of drama texts. It can be argued that a semiotic analysis that is based merely on the setting elements of texts can lead to different interpretations according to the different perceptions of the different types of performance a play is staged by. This perspective goes in conformity with Short's (1996) argument that performance differs from one place to another, from one audience to another, and from one director to another. However, Short himself emphasizes that reading texts is the best way to arrive at an appropriate interpretation of them rather than through performance. This, of course, sheds light on the difference between the semiotics of the play as a text and the semiotics of the play as a performance, which, in turn, accentuates the importance of incorporating the textual elements into the contextual ones in the interpretation of drama texts.

Different oppositional semiotic resources target one cognitive response
The semiotic paradox created by the oppositional signs used throughout the play serves to motivate a specific cognitive activity on the part of readers/audience that directs them towards one interpretation sustaining the ideological viewpoint intended by the playwright. Crucially, the concept of oppositional semiotics discussed in this paper is intended for signs belonging to the same semiotic resource, that is, visual, audible, and/or vocalic resources. In Slave Ship, Baraka has presented his ideological viewpoint by employing six oppositional signs to arrive at one cognitive response. He, therefore, manages to show the way two oppositional signs can share an ideological frame of meaning that blends them together, which, in turn, helps readers attach new semiotic conceptualizations to each oppositional pair of signs. Signs' significations can be attained not only by recognizing their representamens, but also by looking at their opposites. This last point correlates with Chandler's (2007, p. 32) argument that "the meaning of a sign is not contained within it, but arises in its interpretation." Such an interpretative nature of signs is also emphasized by Chandler's (2007, p. 13) assumption that meaning-making process is conducted by "our creation and interpretation of signs" because "we are surely homo significansmeaning-makers."

Conclusion
This paper employed a social semiotic approach to explore the extent to which the ideological point of view in Baraka's Slave Ship has been communicated by a number of oppositional signs: visual (darkness versus light), audible (loud/hard music versus low/soft music), and vocalic (scream versus laughter). The analysis showed that the six oppositional signs operate as conduits of Baraka's ideological viewpoint: blacks' marginality and suffering, and the necessity of revolution. This semiotic staging has been associated with particular linguistic indicators guiding the semiotic interpretation towards the targeted ideological viewpoint in the selected play, which, in turn, highlights the way textual and contextual features of Slave Ship are semiotically incorporated to communicate the ideological message of its writer. It is analytically demonstrated that approaching point of view in drama contributes significantly not only to the characterization process (McIntyre, 2004), but also to the pragmatic interpretation of the play-text. The analysis showed that the six oppositional signs have two main functions. First, they are multidimensional carriers of the ideological point of view, as they operate as action predictors and motivators, suffering signals, suffering-source highlighters, apathy and arrogance indicators, situation commentators, and callresponse markers. Second, they serve as narratorial mediators, representing the dramatic equivalents of a third-person narrator in prose fiction. The analysis further clarified that within oppositional semiotics, incompatible signs can be used to decipher specific ideological viewpoints and to attain particular cognitive responses.
Finally, much further research is still needed on the concept of oppositional semiotics and the way signs' significations can be decoded by referring to other incompatible signs. Also, the way writers move semiotically from one point of view into another within the same text is an area worthy of further research and textual analysis. Further, a comparison might be held between the linguistic representations of viewpoints in the conversational genre and the narrative one. This could yield different and/or similar findings than those approached in this paper, particularly in terms of the linguistic indicators employed in the two literary genres.