Abstract
AbstractThis study has set out to identify, quantify, typify, and exemplify the discourse functions of canonical antonymy in Arabic paremiography by comparing two manually collected datasets from Egyptian and Saudi (Najdi) dialects. Building upon Jones’s (2002) most extensive and often-cited classification of the discourse functions of antonyms as they co-occur within syntactic frames in news discourse, the study has substantially revised this classification and developed a provisional and dynamic typology thereof. Two major textual functions are found to be quantitatively significant and qualitatively preponderant: ancillarity (wherein an A-pair of canonical antonyms project their antonymicity onto a more important B-pair) and coordination (wherein one antonym holds an inclusive or exhaustive relation to another antonym). Three new functions have been developed and added to the retrieved classification: subordination (wherein one antonym occurs in a subordinate clause while the other occurs in a main clause), case-marking (wherein two opposite cases are served by two antonyms), and replacement (wherein one antonym is substituted with another). Semicanonical and noncanonical guises of antonymy are left and recommended for future research.
Highlights
Proverbs compact everyday experiences and common observations in a succinct and formulaic language that renders them easy to remember and retrieve in social interaction (Mieder 2004)
Arabic proverbs are no exception and their central and prevalent linguistic tool for doing so is canonical antonymy, a lexicalsemantic relation held by pairs of words considered to be conventional opposites in neutral contexts and perceived to be typical cases of canonical antonyms in and out of context – antonyms which elicit one another in free word association tasks and when no context is available (Deese 1964; Murphy 2003; Paradis et al 2009; Jones et al 2012)
This study sets out to evidentially champion the structural aspects of proverbs across Egyptian and Saudi Arabic dialects, by typologically comparing the discourse functions of canonical antonyms in Egyptian and Saudi proverbs and by synergizing and supporting the structural paremiological classifications proposed by Mieder (2004) and Coinnigh (2014) with the discursive categories and syntactic frames of antonyms developed by Jones (2002)
Summary
Proverbs compact everyday experiences and common observations in a succinct and formulaic language that renders them easy to remember and retrieve in social interaction (Mieder 2004). This study sets out to evidentially champion the structural aspects of proverbs across Egyptian and Saudi Arabic dialects, by typologically comparing the discourse functions of canonical antonyms in Egyptian and Saudi proverbs and by synergizing and supporting the structural paremiological classifications proposed by Mieder (2004) and Coinnigh (2014) with the discursive categories and syntactic frames of antonyms developed by Jones (2002). In its quest to achieve the objectives and answer the questions above, this study puts forward a hypothesis that Arabic paremiographical antonyms shall contribute, besides the discourse functions of antonyms developed and standardized by The Comparative Lexical Relations Group (Complexica Project) across English (Jones 2002), Swedish (Murphy et al 2009), and Japanese (Muehleisen and Isono 2009), new data-driven and data-based discourse functions which might be retrieved and replicated with different datasets across languages and can rigorously update the current relevant literature and enrich its state of the art. 202 Hamada Hassanein and Mohammad Mahzari gradable canonicity exist in Arabic paremiography, thereby contributing new data-driven and data-based categories and validating the cross-linguistic and possibly universal prevalence of the phenomenon
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