Japanese Proverb Structure And Semantics

Adage (Proverb) is a kind of quite expressive form of conveying in words which is still widely used since it circulated and came into usage thousands of years ago. It can not only reflect a nation's cultural identity and social attitudes, but also the pith of a national's language. Japanese proverbs have their own characteristics, too. However, the emphasis of previous study on Japanese proverbs was mostly on language structure and ideological contents. In this paper, we analyze, conclude and summarize the expressive characteristic of Japanese proverb from the standpoint of syntax and semantics.First, the author summed up the general definition of Japanese proverbs. On this basis, by introducing some examples of daily Japanese proverbs, the author analyzes the use of single, complex sentence and their syntactic features. Most proverbs are short and concise. Single sentences are much more used than multi-sentences and the frequency of using conditional clause is the highest among all kinds of multi-sentences. Proverbs focus on rhythm in the phonological, not only in the rhythm of the whole sentence, but also on the internal use of proverbs in the same homonym and so on. Secondly, from the perspective of semantic, the semantic phenomenon of proverbs is analyzed, according to the semantic properties, make a classification of it, and analyze their characteristics which combined with culture background. Again, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, proverbs and figures of speech are described. Finally, discusses the relationship between meaning of proverbs and culture of modal.