SOCIAL REALITIES REFLECTED IN PROVERBS: A COMPARATIVE APPROACH TO ROMANIAN AND ENGLISH COGNITIVE METAPHORS IN PROVERBS
Teodora Popescu
1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, Romania
This article represents an analytical and contrastive inquiry into social realities reflected in proverb-shaped linguistic expressions from English and Romanian, which are clustered in cognitive metaphors. The proverbs analysed revolve around four major areas of human experience: time, work, money, and man/woman. Proverbs were extracted from already compiled corpora, such as dictionaries of proverbs (monolingual, bilingual and multilingual, for a comparative view). Romanian proverbs were translated into English, and an equivalent in English was provided where applicable. Wherever necessary, further morpho-syntactic or semantic explanations were given, and a qualitative interpretation from the perspective of cultural or anthropological theories was attempted in the majority of cases. The results showed that, although quasi-similar in terms of cognitive categories, there were notable differences between the two languages, either in the number of occurrences for different categories, or even non-existent categories in one language, such as ‘money is knowledge’, ‘work is prudence for old age’, and ‘marriage for love is a blessing’ (all in Romanian).
Keywords: Proverb; Conceptual metaphor; Cognitive category; Romanian versus English.
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How to cite this article: Popescu, T. (2022). Social realities reflected in proverbs: A comparative approach to Romanian and English cognitive metaphors in proverbs. Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education – JoLIE, 15(3), 213-240. doi: https://doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2022.15.3.13
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