A Corpus-based Study On The Usage Of English Proverbs And Their Variations

A proverb is a simple and concrete saying popularly known and repeated. Itexpresses a truth, based on common sense or the practical experience of humans.Generally, English proverbs are considered to have fixed forms and cannot be changed.However, most proverbs can be transformed in various ways according to thecommunicative needs of the speakers in certain contexts. So proverb variations havecome into being to achieve effects of heightening certain atmosphere, humor, satire oreven completely opposite meaning.Corpus is like a language date bank containing a great number of information forstudy, analysis and description. A major reason for compiling linguistic corpora is toprovide the basis for more and accurate and reliable descriptions of how languages arestructured and used. This study is based on the Corpus of Contemporary AmericanEnglish (COCA) and the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(SWECCL) to explore the phenomenon of English proverbs and proverb variations. Sofar COCA has been the largest corpus of English and can be used for free. The corpuscontains more than450million words of text and is equally divided among spoken,fiction, popular magazines, newspapers and academic texts. It includes20million wordseach year from1990-2012and the corpus is updated regularly. SWECCL consists ofwritten English corpus and spoken English corpus. It contains about one million wordsof English major students from2003-2007. Corpus can reflect the real use of language.Based on the prototype theory, this study reveals the nature of English proverbs andproverb variations from cognitive perspective. The prototype theory holds that prototypeis the center of the category, having much distinction and maximum information.Prototype is the reference point for selecting other members and it provides basis for establishing and distinguishing categories. The categorical binary is not clear due to thecontinuity between objects. To some degree, ambiguity of the objective world is the rootof ambiguity of categories. There are some similarities among the members in a family,but the degree of similarities is different. The degree of family resemblance is reducingfrom the representative members to borderline members.In detail, this study discusses the types of English proverb variations in use.Through searching the frequency, it firstly analyzes the use of the original proverbs andproverb variations in COCA and then comes to a conclusion that the main types ofvariations are substitution, deletion and addition. Secondly, by comparing the frequencyof original proverbs with that of proverb variations, the study fins that90%originalproverbs are used flexibly with variant forms. Then, based on SWELL, it analyzes howChinese learners use English proverbs. By comparing the frequency of proverbs inCOCA and SWECCL, the result is that Chinese learners are used to employ the fixedform proverbs.The study helps English learners learn English proverbs and be familiar withproverb variations by encouraging them to use English proverbs and their variations.The study also helps English learners understand the western culture and improve theirEnglish interest and their levels.