Exploring the Narrative Status of Horse in Chinese, Japanese and Iranian Civilizations, from the View point of Semiotics of Discourse

Narrative structures and elements are main fields to express and reflect the cultural underlying structure of civilizations and recreation of such underlying structure in the form of narrations counts as the important elements of linguistics and semiotics. These narrations, reflect different social and cultural status and express the human thoughts and experiences. So, exploring such narrations is considered a method to access dominant discourse of every society and explain its hidden thoughts. Many narratives include stories and pictures of animals which have had human position in the past and have changed the border between human and animal. Horse had been the subject of mythical narrations in different nations due to its unique specifications such as intelligence, adroit, loyalty and chastity. By adopting the theoretical framework of semiotics of discourse, this research tries to study the status and role of horse in civilizations of China, Japan and Iran to show what structures or process on the basis of horse mythical function are formed and how horse functions in forming and developing these narrations. Narrative analysis of the texts either abstract or concrete shows that there is a kind of semiotic fluctuation which changes horse from an animal and terrestrial creature to an enhanced and holy creature and implicates that how narrations relying on horse as mythical creature and enunciation function of horse are influenced by these fluctuations. The main aim of this research was to study discourse systems on the basis of horse narration function in Chinese, Japanese and Iranian civilizations to answer this question that how and on the basis of which criteria it can be accounted for better understand its status in improving physical and spiritual competence. Accordingly, this study presented at first the review of related literature alongside the investigation of the actional and stative system of the subject.Finally the results showed different kind of horses with diverse axiological features . Furthermore findings of the current study included two different economical and ethical aspects.