JoLIE 15:4/2022
ON HEALTH AND ILLNESS IN ENGLISH PROVERBS AND ANTI-PROVERBS
Gabriela Corina Șanta (Câmpean) 
1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, Romania
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to examine how specific attitudes that are expressed in English proverbs addressing the concepts of health and illness have changed over time and have evolved into variations known as anti-proverbs. An analysis of how the proverbs under scrutiny have been transformed into anti-proverbs as a result of the changes occurring in society was conducted in order to reveal the transformation in people’s mind sets. In addition, the proverbs and the variants thereof have been analysed from a cognitive linguistic point of view and have been grouped according to conceptual metaphors to reveal further meanings and interconnections amongst the concepts. Moreover, the changes that have occurred in the structure of the proverbs must be considered because these changes define how people’s attitudes towards the concepts of health and illness have altered over time.
The corpus consists of three categories of English proverbs pertaining to the concepts of health and illness and their anti-proverbs. They were retrieved from printed and online sources, such as a dictionary of proverbs entitled Proverbs: A Handbook (Mieder 2004) and a website, quotemaster.org. The starting point was identifying the proverbs and their variants, followed by an analysis from the semantic point of view to detect how people had changed their positions regarding the attitudes under discussion. Both the structure and the meaning of the proverbs and their variants were considered because they reflect the changes in the attitudes of the people who created them due to social change. In addition, the cognitive approach in the current paper consisted of a combination of the Pragglejaz Group’s metaphor identification technique (2007), Charteris-Black’s mapping sampling method (2004), and Lakoff and Johnson’s approach to metaphor conceptualisation in 1980 (CMT). Specifically, starting from the idea that the proverbs are metaphorical in meaning, they were analysed as metaphors and then grouped according to the conceptual metaphors.
The results proved that the development of society is also reflected in proverbs, and that proverbs change according to people’s needs in order to present their thoughts and beliefs. Furthermore, humour and irony are often used as tools to convey a novel message or a change in attitude in the conceptual metaphors identified in the proverbs and their variants. A proverb’s structure is altered to convey a new message or to emphasise a specific attitude that differs from the proverb’s original expression. Accordingly, an anti-proverb is a tool that reflects adjustment and progress. Moreover, the conceptual metaphors that were identified not only confirm the visible changes in the anti-proverb structure, but also clarify the hidden mental justification for preserving and adapting the ancestral heritage. Overall, proverbs and their associated anti-proverbs support the idea of change, progress and novelty, as ordinary people use them to reveal that each generation is similar to yet different from the previous one.
Keywords: English proverbs; Anti-proverbs; The concept of health; The concept of illness; Conceptual metaphor.
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How to cite this paper: Șanta (Câmpean), G. C. (2022). On HEALTH and ILLNESS in English proverbs and anti-proverbs. Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education – JoLIE, 15(4), 147–162. https://doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2022.15.4.8
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