THE CONCEPT OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IN ROMANIAN AND ENGLISH PROVERBS
Gabriela Corina Șanta (Câmpean) 
1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, Romania
Abstract
This article represents a comparative and contrastive study of English and Romanian proverbs in relation to political correctness, which are then clustered in conceptual metaphors. The aim of this paper is to examine how political correctness is expressed in English and Romanian proverbs and what similarities and differences can be detected between the Romanian and English peoples’ attitudes regarding the way they choose their words in order not to offend others. The proverbs in the self-made corpus relate to the concept of speech in its dual nature, i.e. kind and harmful. Proverbs were retrieved from monolingual and bilingual dictionaries of proverbs, and the starting point of the research is to analyse the specialist literature on political correctness, proverbs and Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The methodology includes the proverbs identification stage focusing on the terms such as word, language, mouth and their synonyms, specifically the choice of particular words, followed by their analysis from the semantic point of view and their conceptualisation. Thus, the results prove that political correctness has represented a concern from the early stages of our society, yet it has been rendered in a different style that is expressed nowadays. The conceptual metaphors of political correctness are constructed using good words and bad words as target or source domains in connection to concepts such as wealth, health, harm or wisdom. Furthermore, both similarities and dissimilarities between the Romanian and English attitudes are supported by the identified conceptual metaphors, which also clarify the hidden mental explanation for the ancestors’ heritage.
Keywords: English proverbs; Romanian proverbs; Biblical proverbs; Political correctness; Conceptual metaphor.
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How to cite this article: Șanta (Câmpean), G.-C. (2023). The concept of political correctness in Romanian and English proverbs. Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education - JoLIE, 16(1), 143–158. https://doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2023.16.1.9
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