Cultural values and the pragmatic significance of proverbial sayings in Tafi and Ewe

Abstract

Proverbs have cognitive and socio-cultural value. As tools for socialisation, proverbs are channels of shared moral and cultural values in communities of practice. The paper investigates the functions of, and the cultural values embodied in selected proverbial sayings in Tafi, a Ghana-Togo Mountain language, and their counterparts in Ewe, a Gbe language. The analysis is based on a small corpus of proverbs gathered during immersion fieldwork among the Tafi, and relies on ethnographic and linguistic methods. The Ewe versions are extracted from proverb collections and from the equivalents provided by Tafi bilinguals. From a semantic and a pragmatic perspective, proverbs have both textual and indexical, context-dependent, meanings. I explore the textual semantics of some of the Tafi and Ewe proverbial sayings drawing on the semantic template for proverbs used in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). It is suggested that the semantic structure of proverbs comprises framing components of traditionality and of their status as folk wisdom, as well as components describing the message, namely, the recurrent situation that calls forth the proverb, the advice and the analogy in the proverb. The paper reveals that patterns of proverb performance are similar across the languages suggesting shared practices due to language and cultural contact in proverbial language use.