engleski

Cognitive mechanisms in creation and interpretation of proverbs: A study of Croatian and English words of wisdom

In their account of proverbs, Lakoff and Turner (1989) argue that proverbs rest on the metaphor GENERIC IS SPECIFIC “which allows us to understand a whole category of situations in terms of one particular situation”. Our recent research of proverbs and their modifications in public written communication in Croatian and English has indicated their marked presence in newspaper headlines, which, we believe, supports Lakoff and Turner’s account. Apart from being purely stylistic tools, proverbs in this position also evoke rich images in reader's mind and thus effectively prepare him/her for the text that follows. The metaphor GENERIC IS SPECIFIC is also the reason why we can understand proverbs and their modifications even if we encounter them for the first time. Working on a corpus of Croatian and English proverbs and their modifications, we will primarily be concerned with establishing what cognitive mechanisms are employed in creation and interpretation of proverbs. We expect our analysis to show that speakers of Croatian and English both use the same, universal cognitive mechanisms in the creation and interpretation of proverbs and that differences, present at the lexical level, stem from different cultural settings and profiling.

proverb creation and interpretation; cognitive mechanisms; cultural settings

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