| Proverbs show the spirit of the national language with their specific brevity, humor, wisdom and implicature. Their forms vary in rhythms, antithesis, contrast, etc., by which some fresh and vivid expressions has been fulfilled into their context.The study of the proverb properties, functions and meanings is helpful in understanding how people learn and comprehend figurative language, and the proverb nature reveals some dramatic insights into the relationship of language and thought. The present paper also shows that human cognition is shaped fundamentally by various processes of figuration. Therefore, the importance of this perspective to the study of proverbs is that it advances the discussion beyond the cultural and social level to include the individual and psychological. It also moves away from the focus on general kinds of situations to the specific and beyond the concept of folklore as items towards a concept of folklore as communicative process.This dissertation begins with the earliest historical period in which there are substantial records available and ends with the application of present-day theories and research. It reviews several works which have examined the relationship between the use of proverbs as a form of artistic expression and social, cultural, and psychological factorsthat have an impact upon proverb usage and interpretation, upon functions and meanings of items. And the analysis throughout my work is based on the assumption that an understanding of a given proverbial speech event relies upon the study of the entire situation in which that event occurs.Chapter One gives an introduction of the dissertation. First comes its organization and significance. Then, it tries to get a comprehensive definition of proverbs, discusses their properties, functions, and some issues concerning proverb interpretation which turns out to be useful for the ensuing discussion of the comprehension processes.In Chapter Two, it reviews many different views that have evolved to analyze interesting and complex proverbs: the personal, formal, religious, literary, practical, cultural and cognitive views. They have different goals and are pursued with different techniques, so they provide us with different information. They are all interesting and worthwhile in their own right. However, the scientific understanding of proverbs is based more on the cognitive, cultural and formal views. The cultural view uses concepts and techniques that, generally speaking, are not part of cognitive science, but that supplement it in important ways. The formal view provides important information about the linguistic character of proverbs and how they might be classified. In contrast to the cultural and formal views, the cognitive view treats proverbs as a theoretical mental construct and emphasizes the universal microcognitive, pancultural processes that underlie them.In chapter Three, a brief summary is made of the main theories on the comprehension of proverbs. Earlier theoretical approaches to proverbs largely stemmed from the cultural view and thus focused on the particular interpretations and social effects of familiar proverbs. These approaches did not address issues of microcognition such as the memory format of a proverb, how figurative meanings are constructed, the mental format for these meanings, and the mental processes behind their application. Current theories, namely, the ECBT-The Extended Conceptual Base Theory (Honeck &Temple, 1994), the GCMT-The Great Chain Metaphor Theory (George Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), the DCT-The Dual Coding Theory (Walsh, 1988), have taken a more microcognitive perspective. Even though all three theories have provided some insights into proverb cognition, they remain some problems generated during the comprehension and use of proverbs.Hence, Chapter Four and Chapter Five examine individually the proverb nature and proverb performance in a series of language processing systems. Accordingly, someassumptions and attempts are made which are expected to provide a compr... |
PDF Full Text Request