engleski

Reflections on the Metaphorical Motivation for Proverb Meaning

In this study proverbs and metaphors are perceived as models of cognitive economy and as adjustement of cognitive patterns to the nedds of communication. It seems that the maker of a proverbial sentence frequently selects metaphors as categorization tools of of our experience. Quite often we rely on models of the concrete world to conceptualize abstract phenomenon. We have spatial conceptualization of abstract world, e.g. A man is a wolf to a man (atrocity=wolf). The structure of proverb represents a kind of comromise in which the needs of production, perception and memory are all partially satisfied. This kind of analysis helps us to understand the way in which humans link words together in their minds. We would like to suggest that there is a motivation principal for such syntactic properties of proverbs and that is the learnability principle.

metaphor; proverb; cognition; colour

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