A Corpus-based Study On The Variations Of English Proverbs

As the crystallization of people's wisdom, proverbs reflect and mirror cultures in the most effective way. They are considered as an indispensable part of English language. Although fixedness is one of their most important features, variation of English proverbs is widespread. More specifically, English proverb as the conventionalized form, one of its important features is no changes in use. Any of its components cannot be replaced, added or deleted. According to Moon (1998), the most salient features of proverbs are: institutionalization, lexicogrammatical fixedness and semantic non-compositionality. Therefore, with respect to the form of proverbs, they are usually fixed or frozen, which means, they allow no changes. However, there are a number of proverbs in English language that can be changed by language users through various modifications or transformations (such as substitution, deletion, addition, antonym and reversion), which are defined as'proverb variations'in this thesis. Through these, people can achieve the effects of rendering the atmosphere, expressing emotions, highlighting a certain concept or witty humor.The main target of this thesis is to explore the phenomenon of English proverb variations with the help of the Corpus of Contemporary American English. On the one hand, with regard to the types of English proverb variations, we will discuss the following: substitutions, additions, deletions, antonyms and reversions. Through searching the frequency of the proverb citation form and the variant form in COCA, we find that substitutions, deletions and additions are the main variation types. In addition, by comparing the frequency of citation forms with that of variant forms, 90% of the citation form of English proverbs have variant forms. The phenomenon of English proverb variations is becoming understandable and widely accepted by language users who are likely to use proverbs in a more flexible way according to the context. On the other hand, with the help of frame theory and prototype and category theories of cognitive linguistics,we can fully explore the cognitive nature of the variations of English proverbs.On the whole, this dissertation contains five chapters:Chapter One provides an overall introduction of this study, which clarifies the thesis topic, research objectives, methodology and main contents of each chapter.Chapter Two is the literature review, which consists of four sections, English proverbs, English Proverb Variations, previous studies of proverb at home and abroad, and advantage of using a corpus for language research: in the first section, the definitions of proverbs have been listed and common characteristics and functions of proverbs mentioned in those definitions have been summarized; in the second section, the relationship of proverbs and variability is illustrated and the author defined the English proverb variations in this study; in the third section, reviews have been made on previous studies of proverbs in China and studies abroad; in the four section, as the corpus linguistics is the main researching method of this paper, the development history of the corpus approach to study linguistics is briefly introduced, with a detailed explanation of the COCA corpus, where the data are collected from.Chapter Three presents the research methodology including the research questions, research subjects, data collection and data processing.Chapter Four is the major part of this study, that is, the data analysis and the results findings are discussed. Based on the classification and distribution of English proverb variation, the author focuses on analyzing the frequency of English proverb variations and exploring cognitive motivations of the variation of English proverbs through the frame theory and prototype and category theories.Chapter Five presents the conclusion part,giving a brief review of the previous findings. Meanwhile, due to the limited time and materials, the findings and conclusion of this thesis are rather preliminary, which requires further research at a more general level.