PROVERBS IN THE SYSTEM OF LANGUAGE AND THEIR CREATIVE USE: A CROSS-CULTURAL VIEW

Abstract

Proverbs form part and parcel of intangible cultural heritage. They are handed down from generation to generation and retained in the collective long-term memory of a people, constituting part of their language and culture. The purpose of this paper is to revisit proverbs and examine some of their essential features in the system of language and in their creative use in discourse from a cross-language and a cross-cultural perspective. This approach calls for semantic and stylistic analyses of empirical material, which I have chosen from my own archive of English and Latvian proverbs. Linguistic examination of proverbs promotes an understanding of their func- tioning across the broad spectrum of languages and cultures, bringing out similarities in the figurative structure of their base form and their stylistic use in various types of discourse. Cognitive linguistic research on proverbs reveals an infinite diversity of expression of figurative thought: a manifestation of the capacity of the human mind for abstraction and generalisation. The study of figurative meaning of proverbs and its changes in discourse accounts for the uniqueness of their stylistic use in text, which lies in the creativity of the cognitive mind. Stylistic use of the same proverb and the same stylistic pattern yields a different creative form of expression. Novel stylistic instantiations emerge in discourse as a reflection of the development of figurative thought.