CHAPTER TWO

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

2.0 Overview

The present chapter provides literature on style and stylistics , as well as the
methods used for analyzing proverbs of love such as deviation, repetition,
and parallelism. Then it presents the literature on pragmatics, which covers
the concept of speech acts, implicture and recontextualization. Finally, it
describes the proverbs of love, their characteristics, the similarities and
differences between the proverbs of love in English and Arabic.

2.1 Style and Stylistics

2.1.1 Style

Generally speaking, the term style is often used to refer to the individual’s
distinctive way of communication. Everyone has a particular style that s/he
uses in everyday life whether in fashion, designing a house or the way of
writing. This is well reflected in Buffon’s (1953, cited by Dolven, 2018:
105) well-known dictum “style is the man”, which means that everyone has
his/her own particular way of doing something and no two individuals have
exactly the same style and/or character.

There are special characteristics which differentiate the style of one

person from another and this style maybe influenced by his/her “social and
political background, religious inclination, culture, education, geographical
location” (Zamruddin and Arafah, 2019: 423). However, from a theoretical
perspective, the term style is rather controversial, because it is often defined
and used differently by different scholars. Each definition of the term style
emphasizes a certain characteristic of its nature and use. Therefore, the term
style can be used to refer to the linguistic habit of specific authors, as in
Dickens’ or Elliot’s styles, or related to way in which language is used in
particular genre, period or school of writing, as in the Victorian style in
novel writing.

In the same vein, Crystal and Davy (1969: 9) state that the term ‘style’
has multiple meanings. The first meaning refers to idiosyncrasies and habits
associated with individuals, arguing that “style may refer to some or all of
the language habits of one person as Shakespeare’s style”. In fact, style is an
interactional term that focuses on the writer's style referring to his/her
“linguistic habits and the characteristic of language in use” (Thornborrow
and Wareing, 2005: 4). This accords well with Lyons’ (1970, 19) definition
of the term, as he (ibid.) defines style as “variation in the use of language”.
Two or more individuals can express the same idea or information in
different styles by using different structures and vocabularies, which means
that each writer has his/her own style that differs from that of the others.

The second meaning of the term style, according to Crystal and Davy
(1969), refers to any or all habits of language that are commonly used by a
speech community; they add that “style may refer to some or all of the
language habits shared by a group of people at one time, or over a period of
time, as the style of Augustan poets, the style old English ‘heroic’ poetry”,
or even the way to write civil service forms or public speaking. Along the
same line, style can be used as an analytical category to analyze the
language of different literary works such as a novel, a poem or a short story
(Thornborrow and Wareing, 2005: 4).

The third meaning is rather restrictive in nature as “it is used in an

evaluative sense, referring to the effectiveness of a mode of expression”.
This meaning applies to the everyday conceptualization of the term, which is
associated with “saying the right thing in the most effective way” or as
“good manners” (Thornborrow and Wareing, 2005: 4).

The fourth meaning of the term style is related to literary language, as

Crystal and Davy (1969: 10) state, “style is as a characteristic of effective
writing”, and style makes the writing more effective and beautiful. This is
the main sense of style that the literary critics focus on.

Correspondingly, the term of style is regarded as “a variation in

language”, as Hockett (1958, 556) outlines, “two utterances in the same
language which convey approximately the same information, but which are
different in their linguistic structure, can be said to differ in style”.
Additionally, style is also considered as a deviation from the linguistic
norms. In this sense, Enkivst (2016:15) claims that “style can be seen as a
departure from the set of patterns which have been labeled as norm”. The
concept of style as deviation means that there are norms, agreements and
regulations which are often maintained. Deviation may occur in any levels
of language including “phonological, syntactic, lexico-sementic and
pragmatic levels”.

Since style is variation in language use, it can best be regarded as a

choice. This view is highlighted by Enkvist (2016: 12) who argues that style
is “the choice between alternative expressions”. This notion indicates that
each language has certain alternative expressions through which an
individual can choose anyone to convey his/her ideas, emotions and
experiences. By the same token, Halliday (1994: 106) indicates that “there
are many ways of accounting in language for the various events that
constitute our mental picture of reality”. In fact, there are also several ways
to use the resources afforded by the language system to represent same event
in many different ways (Simpson, 2004: 22). The stylistic choices made by
individuals upon using language, whether consciously or unconsciously, are
always motivated by a set of linguistic rules, registers conventions or other
sociocultural and contextual parameters (Nørgaard, et al., 2010: 156). Being
motivated, these stylistic choices consequently have a significant effect on
interpretation of the texts (Simpson, 2004: 22).

Therefore, style can be defined as “a mode of expression which

involves linguistic choice and content” used “in a given context, by a given
person, for a given purpose” (Leech and Short, 2007: 13). Style is a dress of
thought (ibid: 13) in both speaking and writing; it is a means of linguistic
expression by which the reader is able to explain the intention of the writer,
also it can be the distinctive characteristics among other characteristics or
choices (Al-azawi, 2014: 7). This idea has already been confirmed by
Thornborrow and Wareing (2005: 2) who claim that “style is the selection of
certain linguistic forms or features over the possible ones”. In brief, the term
style has multiple meanings and can be defined differently depending on the
context in which it is used, whether in everyday language sense, a linguistic
sense or a literary sense. This point is highlighted by Wales (2014: 397-399)
who argues that style can be used to refer to the distinctive manner of using
language in both speaking and writing in a way affected by the situation,
register, genre, medium, degree of formality, and/or epoch.

2.1.2 Stylistics

Historically, The term “Stylistics” can be traced back to the “style of oral
expression” (Nørgaard, et al,. 2010: 2). Even though, stylistics is a 20 th
century phenomenon, it has begun to be studied since the eighteenth century.
Babajide (2000: 123) states that “it is reasonable to claim that stylistics as a
discipline emanated from the elocution aspect of classical rhetoric”.

The study of stylistics was developed by the theoretical insights of

Russian formalism (school of literary criticism) at the beginning of the
twentieth-century. Jakobson (1896‐1982) was most prominent figure in this
school. He was interested in specifying the qualities of ‘poetic language’.
His works had a great influence on the development of stylistics. After that,
in 1926 the Prague linguistic circle was established which was to become
famous as the birthplace of structuralism. Mukařovský was the prominent
member of this school whose great interest was in identifying “the formal
and functional distinctions between literary and non‐literary writing”. He
(ibid:1964) considers literary texts as deviant from the ‘standard language’
(Busse and McIntyre, 2010: 3-14).

In the 1960s, stylistics became prominent in the UK and US and even

further expanded in Europe especially in France because of Charles Bali and
Leo Spitzer contribution in this field of study (Mode, 2015: 13). As De
Saussure’s student ‘Charles Bali’ wrote an important work about French
Stylistics in 1909. This work gave knowledge on the applicable nature of
stylistics that it is “researchable area of linguistics”; where “linguistic eyes”
are used to display literary texts (Mode, 2015: 13). Moreover, Leo Spitzer’s
method to style was called as “Expressive Stylistics” that it was concentered
on “the positive relationship between the stylistic features of a text and the
author’s psychological mood” (Mc Arthur, 1996: 914). Later on, Spitzer
began to focus on the stylistic devices that a writer uses in his work rather
than the writer himself. This indicates distinction between two kinds of
stylistics (linguistic and literary stylistics); the former focuses on linguistic
features of style, whereas the latter concentrates on the devices that give the
literary texts its literariness (Mode, 2015: 13).

Nowadays, the word “Stylistics” is a contested term, as different

groups of scholars, including linguists and literary critics, debate its scope
and definition. Stylistics can simply be defined as “the study of styles”. This
means that “style” is central issue in the study of stylistics. Many scholars in
their definitions have tried to emphasize that stylistics is a subfield of
linguistics since it is the linguistic concepts and features that are employed
in analyzing literary texts. Arthur (1996:914) defines stylistics as “the
branch of linguistics that studies style, especially in works of literature”.
Likewise, Chapman (1973: 11) says that stylistics is “the linguistic study of
different styles”. In the same vein, Turner (1975: 7) provides a definition in
which he states that, “stylistics is that part of linguistics which concentrates
on variation in the use of language, often, but not exclusively, with special
attention to the most conscious and complex use of language in literature”.

Crystal and Davy (1969: 9) argue that “linguistics is the academic

discipline which studies language scientifically”. Stylistics, with its focus on
certain aspects of language variation, is therefore essentially a part of
linguistics. Along the same line, Ullmann (1973: 41) claims that “stylistics is
not a mere branch of linguistics but a parallel discipline which investigates
the same phenomena from its own point of view”. This accords with
Turner’s (1975: 30) view which indicates that “stylistics has the same
divisions as linguistics and that there are phonological, lexical and syntactic
levels in the study of style”.

However, there are other scholars who consider stylistics as a bridge

connecting between the two disciplines; namely, linguistics and literature.
According to Widdowson (1975: 4) “stylistics is an area of mediation
between two disciplines… stylistics can provide a way of mediating between
two subjects: English Language and literature”. Widdowson (ibid.) clarifies
his conceptualization of the field through the figure (1):

Figure 1: Widdowson’s Conceptualization of Stylistics

Disciplines: linguistics literary criticism

Stylistics

Subjects: (English) language (English) literature

This figure shows that stylistics is “neither a discipline nor a subject in

its own right, but a means of relating disciplines and subjects”
(Widdowson,1975: 4). He also adds that “this relationship is not only
between discipline and discipline, subject and subject but also between
subject and discipline and the reverse” (ibid.). Likewise, Gibbons and
Whiteley (2018: 3) suggests that stylistics is “the integrated study of
language and literature”; Leech and Short (2007: 3) agree with this claim
arguing that stylistics is “the study of the relationship between linguistic
form and literary function” (Mode, 2015: 14). Moreover, Nørgaard, et al.
(2010: 1) argue that “stylistics is the study of the ways in which meaning is
created through language in literature as well as in other types of text”. They
(ibid.) also add that stylisticians by using their linguistic models and theories
try to describe explain and analyze how and why a text works and how do
we get from the words on the page to their meaning. In brief, there is no
definition for stylistics that is universally agreed upon. Yet, the most suitable
definition for the purpose of this thesis is the one provided by Turner (1975:
7), which states that “stylistics is that part of linguistics which concentrates
on variation in the use of language, often, but not exclusively, with special
attention to the most conscious and complex use of language in literature”.
Then he (ibid, 1975: 30) adds that “stylistics has the same divisions as
linguistics and that there are phonological, lexical and syntactic levels in the
study of style”.

2.1.3 Foregrounding and Defamiliarization

The term “foregrounding” is the translation of the word (aktualisace) which

was first introduced by the Czech theorist Mukařovský (1891–1975). This
concept was developed within the paradigm of Prague school of
structuralism. Prague school linguists argue that “language is being used
poetically, or aesthetically when its expressive aspect is dominant” (Hawkes,
2003: 58), and that happens, when language deviates from standard norms,
by using certain devices which make the act of expression more prominent
and foregrounded (ibid.). Furthermore, Simpson (2004: 50) maintains that
foregrounding usually includes “a stylistic distortion, either through an
aspect of the text which deviates from a linguistic norm or, alternatively,
where an aspect of the text is brought to the fore through repetition or
parallelism”. This means that foregrounding may take two main forms: the
first is deviation from a linguistic norm and the second is overuse of a
linguistic pattern or norm.

Foregrounding is the stylistic process that may occur in both literature

and ordinary language; it can be triggered and analytically traced across
different levels of language analysis and description. Therefore, we can
speak of phonologically triggered foregrounding (e.g., alliteration, rhyme),
grammatically triggered foregrounding (e.g., inversion, ellipsis), or
semantically triggered foregrounding (e.g., simile, metaphor,
personification) (Miall and Kuiken, 1994: 390).

In terms of use, foregrounding can be found across different genres

and text-types. Mukafovsky (1964: 20) indicates that foregrounding can be
used in everyday language, as “spoken discourse or journalistic prose”, but it
may happen spontaneously without pervious planning. Whereas, in literary
texts, foregrounding in poem, novel, drama and so on should be both be
systematic and hierarchical (ibid.). Then, in everyday language
communication is the main purpose, and foregrounding is not usually
employed. In literature, however, the main function of language is to disrupt
the act of communication through aesthetically motivated foregrounding to
enhance the reader’s experience of reading the literary text. In line of this
argument, Mukafovsky (1964: 19) states that:

[i]n poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the

extent of pushing communication into the background as the objective of
expression and of being used for its own sake; it is not used in the services
of communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of
expression, the act of speech itself.
 In this respect, Mukafovsky does not mean to say that the literature
has no communicative purpose, but he (1977: 6, 71) points out that
foregrounding allows literature to provide complex meaning that ordinary
language does not (Miall and Kuiken, 1994: 390).

In terms of effect, foregrounding can increase cognitive resonance and

enhance the reader’s experience through making strange, or defamiliarize
certain linguistic patterns. As Simpson (2004: 50) indicates, foregrounding
is “a technique for ‘making strange’ in language, or a method of
‘defamiliarisation’ in textual composition”. The concept of
‘defamiliarization’ is the main contribution of Russian Formalism in
stylistics; this concept was first introduced by the Russian Formalist
Šklovsky (1917) who considers it as “a central aspect of the technique of
art”, he further states that:

The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms

difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the
process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.
Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not
important (Shklovsky, 1917: 20).

According to Shklovsky (1917), the function of art is to defamiliarize

the familiar in order to reader (listener) to re-perceive what s/he has stopped
observing because of its familiarity (Nørgaard, et al., 2010: 24). In addition,
Oatley (1994) indicates that when readers are faced with unexpected or new
patterns in a text, they typically interact emotionally and curiously. This is
because these new and unexpected linguistic patterns defamiliarize language
as we know it in everyday communication, resulting in increased cognitive
resonance. In this regard, both Kuiken (1994) and Hanauer (1998) argue that
defamiliarization, if triggered by “stylistic variation”, tends to reduce the
predictability of new element in a text and reinforce the esthetic perception
of literary text (also see Bohrn et al, 2012: 2). Therefore, the purpose of
defamiliarization is to increase the effort and the duration of a perceiver’s
experience of a text, this purpose is opposite to ‘habitualization’ or
‘automatization’, the aesthetic deadening that results from an over-
familiarity with language. Foregrounding theory predicts that “a text which
is highly defamiliarized through the use of stylistic elements will be
preferred over text which is easier to read, because it is processed in a more
effective manner” (Bohrn et al, 2012: 2).

[Link] Deviation

In stylistics, the concept of deviation refers to a violation of the rules or

conventions of a language. The concept of deviation is very important in the
study of style because texts may become stylistically special and peculiar
when they deviate from standard norm of language. This norm is either
absolute (as norm that is related to the whole language), or it is relative (as
norm that is related to some set of texts) (Enkvist, 1985: 40).

Aquilina (2014:13) argues that “the term deviation may refer to a veer
from the norms of language as a whole, or it may refer to the norms of
literary composition and even those within a particular text”. Deviation is
one of the strategies of foregrounding which indicates linguistic moves away
from the norms (Stockwell and Whiteley, 2014: 112). Text might be veered
away from an “external or internal norm”. According to Crystal (2008: 134)
deviation can be made at the level of the sentence, or any other unit that
deviates from the rule and it appears “grammatically, phonologically, or
even semantically ill-formed”. Besides, Leech (1969: 56-57) indicates that
deviation can produce fascinating and surprising elements. He (ibid: 59-60)
also adds that a linguistic deviation can be “artistically significant” if it is
first, communicates something, second, communicates the intended meaning
of author and third, if it is felt by the reader to be important.

Deviation may work on two levels: “outside and inside the text”
(Ameen and Salih, 2016: 415). It is called external deviation when it violates
the norms of the language system. Gibbons and Whiteley (2018: 19) state
that “external deviation is a violation of the norm in terms of the everyday
rules of language. Such deviation would therefore be unusual in any text”.
Various kinds of external deviation may be defined through interrelated
levels of linguistic description as “phonological, graphological, syntactical,
morphological and so on”. (Simpson, 2004: 5). On the other hand, internal
deviation is considered as a stylistic device which foregrounds parts of the
literary text. In this strategy, the author (consciously or unconsciously),
refers to these parts as being important for readers to interpret what s/he has
written (Ameen and Salih, 2016: 415). Moreover, Gibbons and Whiteley
(2018: 20) add that “internal deviation is reliant on the features of the
surrounding text and often works in conjunction with repetition and
parallelism”. In both cases, (eternal or internal) deviations will breakdown
the readers’ expectations about the text, making it more cognitively salient
and significant.

Deviant forms can be classified across different levels of analysis.

Leech (1969:37) presents different types of linguistic deviation distinguished
threat the levels of “realization, form, and semantics”. Realization includes
“phonology and graphology”; form contains “grammar and lexicon”; while
semantics comprises “denotative or cognitive meaning”, as illustrated
below:

Table (2.1) Types of devotion (adopted from Leech, 1969)

Realization Form Semantics

Phonology (Grammar (Denotative or

Cognitive
and
Meaning)
Graphology Lexicon)

Based on this categorization, Leech (1969) introduces different kinds of

linguistic deviation including: phonological, graphological, lexical,
syntactic, semantic deviations.

[Link].1 Phonological Deviation

Phonological deviation is the mispronunciation of a sound or syllable that

may happen deliberately in order to maintain rhyme and meter, for example,
pronouncing the noun ‘wind’ like the verb ‘wind’. According to Leech
(1969: 47), phonological deviations involve “irregularities of
pronunciation”. Also, there may be stylistic reasons for phonological
deviation as sometimes this deviation can be the result of habit e.g. children
mispronounced the word because of physical defect (Jones, 1918: 12) or it
can be the result of different dialect or accent.

[Link].2 Graphological Deviation

Graphological deviation can be defined as deviation on “the form of word”

(Widayanti, 2014: 4). As Leech (1969: 47) mentions, “any strangeness of the
written form would be classified as a form of graphological deviation”,
which comprises the arrangement of the words in writing text, the use of
spelling, punctuation, capitalization, hyphenation, italization and so on
(Burke, 2014: 91). Leech (1969: 47) also adds that “graphological deviation
is the violation of writing systems” by ignoring ‘capital letter’ and
‘punctuations’ when they should be used, wrong use of parentheses and so
on. Sometimes, capitalization of varying sizes is used for: emphasis, irony,
satire, and other literary purposes. For example, Oxford Dictionary of
Proverbs uses capital letter to emphasize the significance of capitalized
words: ‘Whom the GODS love die young’, or ‘JOVE but laughs at lovers’
perjury’.

[Link].3 Lexical Deviation

Lexical deviation is “the violation of lexical rule” that is related to

neologism. Neologism is the new word which is presented into language.
One important example of neologism is a nonce-formation that is the
creation of new words. A word is referred to as a nonce-formation, when it
is made up for the nonce, for instance, “for a single occasion” (Leech, 1969:
42). Likewise, Crystal (2008: 329) describes the term nonce-formation as “a
linguistic form which a speaker consciously invents or accidentally uses on a
single occasion”. There are many factors that are responsible for its uses. For
example, the person cannot remember a specific word, then it is formulated
as an alternate approximation, or s/he is constrained by circumstances to
create a new word (Sadoon and al-Aassam, 2010: 121). Nonce-formation
comprises prefixation and suffixation. Prefixation is the attachment of a
prefix at the front of an existing word according to morphological rules. For
example, morpheme ‘un’ is usually added to a verb (un+ verb) but ‘un’ in
Cummings’ (1994: 213) poem is used with ‘abstract noun’ as ‘un wisdom’
that here this word is created by Cummings (ibid.) in his poem as an abstract
noun which referring to the property of haziness. On other hand, suffixation
is the addition of a suffix to the end of a word. As morpheme ‘ly’ that is
usually added to form adverbs or adjectives, but when added it to the end of
a gerund, as Cummings did, it is deemed lexical deviation, e.g., kissingly (Li
and Shi, 2015: 25). Additionally, Functional conversion is another example
of “lexical deviation” which is the process of converting the function of
words that this process is popular in literary language (Short, 2013: 45), as
in using the noun ‘bag’ as a verb ‘to bag’. Eponym is another type of
neologism in which new words are created from proper names. The
examples below showcase lexical deviations in English proverb:

Example 2.1 Barkis is willing.

The word Barkis is taken from the name of Mr. Barkis, a character in David
Copperfield novel (Dickens, 1953: 99):

A: “Are you ready for the race today?”

B: “Oh yeah! Barkis is willin'!” (ibid.)

Dickens used this phrase to indicate that a character has an interest in

marriage and then this phrase became popular and used as the proverb.
[Link].4 Syntactic Deviation

Syntax is “how words are put together to build phrases, how phrases are put
together to build clauses and how clauses are put together to build
sentences” (Miller, 2002: 1). Hence, Leech (1969: 45) divides syntactic
deviation into two types: one is an incorrect grammar and other is a syntactic
rearrangement (hyperbaton). The changing of the order of the words is
known as hyperbaton (Baldick, 2001: 119). One kind of hyperbaton is
anastrophe that is deviation from the normal word order in which the
adjective places after the noun, e.g. ‘our children cute’ (Budiharto, 2018:
90). Another important deviation of grammar is the bad or incorrect
grammar, as in ‘I doesn’t like him’ (Leech, 1969: 45), which must be, ‘I
don’t like him’, since the subject and the main verb are mismatched. Plett
(2010: 183) argues that syntactic deviation is “transformational operations of
addition, deletion, rearrangement and replacement of syntactic components”,
which are most popular in literary work and also proverbs.

[Link].5 Semantic Deviation

Semantic deviation is an important level of linguistic deviation because of

its figurative language that is the heart of literary work. Semantic deviation
is the deviation of meaning. It means that the senses of the “words, phrases,
or sentences” are ambiguous (Widayanti, 2014: 4). Leech (1969: 48) argues
that semantic deviation can be interpreted as ‘non-sense’ or ‘absurdity’.
Leech (1969: 49) identifies several types of semantic deviations. The first
type consists of semantic oddity (transference) and honest deception.
Semantic oddity is more popular in literary work which is transference of
meaning. In other words, it is the conversion from literal meaning to
figurative meaning. Semantic oddity consists of different types of figurative
language: metaphor (including personification), metonymy (including
synecdoche), simile, tautology, and oxymoron.

“Metaphor is the most important figure of speech, in which one thing, idea,
or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another
thing, idea, or action” (Baldick, 2001: 153), and it is more popular in literary
work and also in a proverb. The examples below showcase semantic
deviations in Arabic and English proverbs:

Example 2.2 Love is blind (metaphor)

Example 2.3 ‫الحب اعمى‬ (metaphor)

In these proverbs literal meaning are transferred to figurative meanings by

using metaphors, and specifically personifications. In both languages, love is
compared to the blind person by using the word blind to refer to the idea that
if someone falls in love cannot see the faults of beloved. So, these proverbs
semantically deviate from the literal meaning to indicate a specific
understanding of love.

Synecdoche is defined as “a rule of applying the term for the part to

the whole” (Li and Shi, 2015: 34). And metonymy is the other figure of
speech that uses “the name of one thing for that of something else with
which it is associated” (ibid.).

Example 2.4 Everybody loves a lord. (metonymy)

In example (2.4) the word ‘lord’ is used to symbolize power and money,
which attracts love and respect. Thus, the word lord refers to richness and
power.

Simile is another type of semantic oddity which “involves an explicit

comparison between two things or actions. The majority of similes include
the word like” (Cruse, 2006: 165). Consider the love proverb below:

Example 2.5 Love is like war, Easy to start, hard to end, impossible to
forget.

In example (2.5) above includes an explicit comparison between love and

war by using the word ‘like’. It means that love and war share the same
characteristics and they are easy to start but so hard to end.

Tautology is another type of semantic oddity where the same thing is

said twice but in a different way. It is the repetition or duplication of words.
Such case is depicted in the following proverb:

Example 2.6 Love begets love.

The word “love” is repeated twice in the proverb which makes the proverb
ambiguous for the listener.

Oxymoron is also considered to be one of the semantic deviations

where two opposite terms or phrases are integrated into one sentence as
exhibited in the proverb: “Love makes a wit of the fool”.

The other type of semantic deviation is “honest deception” which

involves a form of “misrepresenting the truth” (Prafitri and Suhatmady,
2014:106). Honest deception includes hyperbole and litotes (ibid.). The term
‘honest deception’ is paradoxical because it is not really deception but it is
used by literary writers for emphasis (Fowler, 1926: 608 cited by Li and Shi,
2015: 35). In this respect, Leech (1969: 166) indicates that these tropes are
related to each other since all of them misrepresent the truth. Thus,
hyperbole distorts truth by saying too much (figure of speech of
overstatement) as exhibited in the proverb: “In a thousand pound of Law
there's not an ounce of love” wherein reality is exaggerated.

[Link].6 Pragmatic Deviation

Deviation can be linguistically or pragmatically motivated. As it is

mentioned by (Leech, 1969), linguistic deviation is divided into
“phonological, graphical, lexical, grammatical, and semantic deviation”.
Pragmatic deviation, on the other hand, occurs due to inappropriate
pragmatic performance or due to pragmatic infelicity, which often involves a
violation of ‘felicity conditions’. Pragmatic deviation is an infringement of
the pragmatic rules; it “…involves deviation from the norms of standard
conversational behavior” (Bowles, 2010: 26).

One of the prominent aspects of pragmatic deviation is the use of

over-politeness and/or impoliteness. Both over-politeness and impoliteness
involve deviating from generally expected verbal and social behaviors in a
given context. In this respect, Chapman (2015: 80) explores how “changes in
strategies of politeness or impoliteness might reflect on character
development and on dramatic tension”. Over-politeness is defined as
“behavior which is evaluated as too polite for the context” (Izadi , 2010: 13).
In this sense, over-politeness violates the level of politeness appropriate for
the context of use. On the other hand, Hammer (2003: 154-155) defines
impoliteness as “a deviation from generally accepted social and verbal
behavior”. Therefore, this aspect presents the occurrence of rude and
shameless behavior or may use rude language to reveal a disrespect or
cruelty (Zidane, 2017: 510).

The other type of pragmatic deviation is irrelevance which is related

to the inadequacy of the speaker's responses to the interlocutor's speech.
Irrelevance indicates that the speaker’s contribution is an inappropriate to
the context. Irrelevance can be the result of the lack of interest in the subject
or motivation to participate in the dialogue. In fact, “irrelevance and
impoliteness” are caused by speakers’ uncooperative behavior (ibid.).
Irrelevance can be employed strategically by novelists and playwrights to
provide profound insights into their characters’ states. Lambrou (2014: 146)
shows how irrelevance can be used as a foregrounding technique in the
narrative style of the fifteen-year-old autistic protagonist, Christopher
Boone, in Mark Haddon’s ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-
Time’. Additionally, Irrelevance can also be employed to “reveal characters’
disrespect, boredom or inattentiveness” towards other characters (Zidane,
2017: 514).

The third type of pragmatic deviation is a type that results from the
violation of norms governing speech acts. The term “speech acts” is defined
as “an utterance that has performative function in language and
communication” (Nwauwa and Anyanwu, 2019: 153). Austin (1962)
classifies speech acts into the “locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary
acts” as:

 Acts of saying something (locution)

  Acts of done in saying something (illocution)
 Acts of done by saying something (perlocution) (Austin,1962:101)
Speech acts deviate from the norm, when they are infelicitous in some way.
Short and Leech (2007: 185) analyzes some extract from a film to show how
an illocution, when performed by someone with no authority, can be
considered deviant speech act. This type of deviant speech act results from a
violation of the preparatory conditions. Consider the example below:

Example 2.7 A student to his professor: I order you to begin class 10

minutes later next time.

The utterer of this directive illocution, i.e. command, is not in the position
that allows him/her to issue orders to his/her professor.

Another kind of deviant speech acts can be generated in the case of

verbal irony. The deviant speech acts associated with verbal irony violate
sincerity condition, as the utterer is not committed to what s/he says, but s/he
says what he says only to create a sense of humor or sarcasm.

To use Short’s (2013) distinction between internal and external

deviations, one can argue that deviant speech acts can be generated
internally or externally deviation. In internal deviation, speakers may say
something but intended another thing, as used in irony, where an indirect
speech acts is intended to convey an opposite meaning. It is more common
in the Arabic proverbs as in:

Example 2.8 ‫بصلة المحب خروف‬

This proverb is internally deviant because its words seem semantically

incompatible but pragmatically appropriate if taken ironically and
humorously, to means that whatever one may do his/her action will be
gratefully accepted by his/her lover. Such an interpretation is supported by
incongruity resolution theory of humor, which assumes that humor is
triggered by resolving the incongruity between two semantic scripts (Attardo
and Raskin, 2017).

On the other hand, speech acts may be externally deviant generated

through the violation of the “preparatory conditions” which is “required a
conventionally recognized context in which the speech act is embedded”
(ibid.). For instance:

Example 2.9 I congratulate you on the suicide of your cousin. (The

speaker approaches the listener as s/he is weeping at the funeral.)

This example shows the violation of ‘the preparatory condition’ because in

such situation (the suicide) is not in hearer's interest, and also maybe the
sincerity condition is invoked.

[Link] Parallelism

Parallelism is another type of foregrounding in which the whole phrases or

clauses are repeated. According to Leech and Short (2007:113) “parallelisms
are identified as structural repetitions in which variable elements occur”.
Parallelism is used as a stylistic device to foreground important aspects of
literary work. Russian formalist, Jakobson (1960) uses the term ‘parallelism’
to refer to “the repetition of the same pattern” whether a phrase or clause
(Wales, 2014: 301). Fabb (1997:137) indicates that parallelism is “sameness
between two sections of a text, it can be structural or semantic”. For
instance, in the proverb “out of sight, out of mind”, the prepositional phrase
is repeated. Whereas, in “he came, he saw, he conquered”, there is the
repetition of ‘the clause’ (ibid.). In parallelism a thought, idea, grammar
pattern, or keyword is repeated. It is a linguistic phenomenon that occurs at
different levels of a language.

Syntactic parallelism is one type of parallelism which occurs when “the form
of one sentence, clause or phrase repeats the form of the other” (Cook, 1989:
15). Montgomery et al (2000: 126) argue that syntactic parallelism is “the
parallelism in form” between two sections of text which contain the same
components. As shown in the proverbs below:

Example 2.10 Home is where the heart is.

Example 2.11 Love me little, love me long.

In the example 2.10, ‘Home is’ has (N+V) pattern which is nominal clause
and it is paralleled to the clause ‘the heart is’ (N+V). On the other hand, in
the example 2.11, ‘love me little’ contains (V+O+Adj) pattern; this
imperative construction is similar to the imperative construction of the ‘love
me long’ (V+O+Adj).
Antithesis is a special type of parallelism. Abrams (1999: 11-12)
argues that antithesis is a “contrast or opposition in the meanings of
contiguous phrases or clauses that manifest parallelism”. In this regard,
Wales (2001: 283) mentions that, “there is usually some obvious connection
in meaning between the repeated units which reinforce the equivalence, but
they need not be synonymous. Parallelism in contrast with antonymy is
known as antithesis”. Consider the English and Arabic proverbs below
which show two contrasting pictures related to love issues, as showcased in
the proverbs: “make love not war”; “ ‫”عدو قريب و لا حبيب بعيد‬.
[Link] Repetition
Repetition is a figure of speech which implies the repetition of “sounds,
words, expressions and clauses in a certain succession or even with no
particular placement of the words” (Kemertelidze and Manjavidze, 2013: 2).
Likewise, Gibbons and Whiteley (2018: 77) indicate that, “repetition is
repeating similar or identical words, phrases, or clauses (thus, including
parallelism and related to foregrounding)”. Repetition is “a reiteration of the
same sound, words or phrases for emphasis” (Sotirova, 2016: 99).
Leech (1977: 84) finds that redundancy is a measure that can be
applied to repetition by using pronouns and other redundancy measures, but
it does not seem possible with parallelism. Likewise, Wales (2014: 366)
maintains that, in everyday conversion, repetition may be considered as a
both: the problem of redundancy. For example, ‘You’re repeating yourself ’,
and a powerful resource of interpersonal participation and relationship, that
is considered as “the primary rhetorical device of spoken language” (ibid.).
Therefore, it can be applied for emphasis, for “game-playing, or out of
intensity of feeling (ibid.). In general, repetition is used in speech and
written texts in order to express “such ideas which otherwise cannot be
expressed straightforwardly” (Kemertelidze and Manjavidze, 2013: 2).
Repetition, then, is very common device in literary works, employed for
emphasizing and also making some important features more prominent.
Repetition which involves sounds is known as ‘phonological
repetition’. There are two main types of ‘phonological repetition’. One of
them is more common in English literature which includes coherent
‘clumps’ of sound, for example, at the end or beginning of a syllable, and is
represented by ‘rhyme and alliteration’.
i. Rhyme is the repetition of same sounds in two or more words, and usually
at the end of a line that makes a certain rhythm. Trask (1996: 311) argues
that, rhyme is “either of two or more words which have identical nuclei in
their stressed syllables and identical sequences of segments after these
nuclei”, as illustrates in the example: “love makes rage, And money makes
marriage”.

ii. Alliteration is the “recurrence of the same sound/letter, or sound/letter

cluster at the beginning of words” (Harvey and Higgins, 1992: 76). As
showcased in the proverb: Lovers live by love, as Larks by leeks.

Repetition may occur at “lexical items” which is the repetition of the

same word. Consider the following Arabic and English love proverbs:
Examples
2.12 love begets love.
2.13 The heart wants what it wants.
2.14 ‫اللي تتغير محبته تتغير مخدته‬
2.15 ‫ابعد لك احب لك‬
In the proverbs 2.12 and 2.13, the words (love) and (wants) are repeated
twice in order to emphasize, importance, and indicate the idea of love. Also,
the repetition is more common in Arabic proverb as seen in examples 2.14
and 2.15 the words ‫ ))تتغير‬and (‫ ) لك‬are repeated in the same sentence.

2.2 Pragmatics
The term ‘pragmatics’ is derived from Morris’ (1938) “theory of signs”.
Morris (ibid.) divides semiotics into three branches: syntax, semantics, and
pragmatics, which studies the relation of signs to interpreters (Levinson,
1983:1). The term ‘pragmatics’ is notoriously hard to define. In fact,
Levinson (ibid: 6- 9) reviewed different definitions for the term 'pragmatics',
highlighting the shortcomings of each.
One of Levinson’s definitions of pragmatics is that it is “the study of
those principles that will account for why a certain set of sentences are
anomalous, or not possible utterances”. Based on this definition, a sentence
like “Come there please!” is considered “anomalous” because there is no
normal context to use this sentence in. Another definition is that “pragmatics
is the study of language from a functional perspective, that is, it attempts to
explain facets of linguistic structure by reference to non-linguistic pressures
and causes” (Levinson, 1983: 7). The defect of this definition is its failure to
disentangle pragmatics from other branches interested in language function
such as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Levinson’s third definition
invokes Chomsky's theory of “competence and performance”, “pragmatics
should be concerned solely with principles of language usage, and have
nothing to do with linguistic structure” (ibid.).This definition limits
pragmatics just to the performance part of language and removes the
competence part. Levinson rejects such definition as he claims that
“pragmatists are interested specifically in the inter-relation of language
structure and principles of language usage” (Levinson, 1983: 9).
Another definition of pragmatics which is adopted from Levinson is
that, “pragmatics is the study of those relations between language and
context that are grammaticalized, or encoded in the structure of a language”.
While, Mey (2001:5-6) refuses the latter because Levinson’s definition
accepts only such use of language as pragmatically relevant which has a
distinct grammatical expression. Mey (2001:6) defines pragmatics as,
“studies the use of language in human communication as determined by the
conditions of society”. In this sense, pragmatics deals with how the
interpretation of utterance meaning does not only depend on the speaker’s
and listener’s structural and linguistics knowledge but also depends on the
sociocultural context, pre-existing knowledge, and other factors (Umezinwa,
2016: 5). Likewise, Crystal (2008: 379) defines pragmatics as follow:
The study of language from the point of view of the users – especially of
the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in
social interaction and the effects their use of language has on other
participants in an act of communication.

In the same vein, Yule (1996: 3) maintains that “pragmatics is

concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker (or
writer) and, interpreted by a listener or reader)”.
Pragmatics has become more related to stylistic analysis in the recent
years. On the one hand, “pragmatics is an aspect of the study of language in
use. It is concerned with how language users interact, communicate and
interpret linguistic behavior” (Chapman and Clark, 2014: 1). On the other
hand, stylistics focuses on the contribution of language to the understanding
and evaluation of texts (ibid.). The interface between these fields is known
as pragma-stylistics. Black (2006: 2) states that “since pragmatics is the
study of language in use, it is understandable that stylistics has become
increasingly interested in using the insights it can offer”.
In this respect, the field of pragma-stylistics contains pragmatic and
stylistic approaches in order to investigate “how (literary) language is used
in context and how it contributes to the characterization of the protagonists
in a literary piece of art or how power structures are created and so on”
(Nørgaard et al, 2010: 39). The field of pragma-stylistics contains many
areas from both pragmatics and stylistics, and the common purpose of both
fields is to focus on the context which involves “social, cultural, linguistic,
and authorial contexts of production and reception” (Nørgaard et al, 2010: p.
40-41). In addition to context, pragma-stylistics focuses on areas such as:
speech act theory, Grice's co-operative principle, and relevance theory
(Black, 2006: 150-155).

2.2.1 Implicature
Pragmatics has always focused on how people interpret the meanings that
arise from producing utterances in context, and this clarifies that “an
understanding is something we reach or come to” (Culpeper and Haugh,
2014: 133). Meaning, in this sense, is conceptualized in terms of cognitive
representations. A cognitive representation of meaning is basically “a
generalized meaning form” or “interpretation” that can find natural language
structures (ibid: 84). In this regard, Grice (1967, 1989) formulates an
important observation about speaker’s meaning representation into a theory
of pragmatic meaning.
Grice (1989) argues that meanings go beyond what is said. Meaning
can be “broadly classified as speaker-intended implicatures, that is,
meanings that are implied or suggested rather than said” (Culpeper and
Haugh, 2014: 81). Moreover, Grice, (1989) contrasts what is implicated,
either by a speaker or an utterance, with what is said. Such a contrast allows
Grice to focus on a certain type of meaning, the meaning which was neither
“natural nor conventional in nature”, and his main goal was to understand
how speakers can mean something (Culpeper and Haugh, 2014: 81). Grice
divides meaning into natural and non-natural. It is a natural meaning where a
certain sign is causally related to an event or concept, for example, “those
clouds mean rain”. But non-natural meaning is not exhausted by, linguistic
(or word) meaning, but it arises through the speaker having a specific kind
of meaning intention (ibid.). Besides, Horn and Ward (2006: 3) maintain
that, “implicature is a component of speaker meaning that constitutes an
aspect of what is meant in a speaker’s utterance without being part of what is
said”. Consider the following example:
Example 2.16 A. Are you going to Paul’s party?
B. I have to work.
In this example, speaker B implies that s/he cannot go to Paul’s party.
Although s/he does not mention that s/he doesn’t go to the party, and only
say s/he has worked. So, “I am not going to Paul’s party” is the implicature
that derives from the utterance “I have to work”. Thus, speaker B answers in
an indirect way that s/he can’t go to the party (ibid.).
Grice (1975) introduces the terms ‘implicate’ and ‘implicature’ in
order to distinguish between “what the speaker said” (semantic meaning)
from “what the speaker implied” (pragmatic meaning). In other words, he
(ibid) coins these terms to differentiate them from the verb ‘imply’ and the
noun ‘implication’ which are used in logic and semantics. Cruse (2006: 85)
defines implicature as, “parts of the meanings of utterances which, although
intended, are not strictly part of ‘what is said’ in the act of utterance, nor do
they follow logically from what is said”.
Implicature is of different types. It can be communicated based on
general or specific contextual information, or it may be communicated based
on some of conventional meaning of particular words and expressions. For
example, “Even John came to the party” implies that “John’s coming to the
party was unexpected”, and this implicature is communicated based on the
meaning of the word “even” (Horn and Ward, 2006: 3-4). As eloquently
explained by Cruse (2006: 85), there are two types of implicature: (i) those
that are closely associated with certain linguistic expressions (conventional
implicatures), for example, the element of surprise associated with the
linguistic expression ‘yet’ in “Haven’t you finished yet?” (in this example
the speaker never mentioned that s/he is surprised), and (ii) others which
should be inferred, and for them contextual information is so important
(conversational implicatures). Thus, Grice classifies implicature into two
main types: conventional and non-conventional implicature, as is shown in
figure (2) below:

Figure 2: Types of Gricean implicature (adapted from Levinson, 1983:

131).

Implicature
Conventional Non-conventional
Conversational Non-
conversational
Generalized Particularised

[Link] Conventional Implicatures

Conventional implicatures, as opposed to conversational implicatures, are

not based on cooperative principle and maxims. They don’t need context for
their interpretation. Yule (1996: 45) states that “conventional implicatures
are associated with specific words and result in additional conveyed
meanings when those words are used”. Besides, Huang (2007: 54) remarks
that:
 Conventional implicature is a non-truth-conditional inference which is
not deductive in any general, natural way from the saying of what is said,
but arises solely because of the conventional features attached to
particular lexical items and/or linguistic constructions.

The conjunction ‘But’ is one of these words, in which the

interpretation of (p but q) is depended on the conjunction (p & q (+ > p is in
contrast to q) (Yule, 1996: 45). For instance, the sentence “Sara is poor but
she is honest” includes “conventional implicature of contrast” between the
information contained in p and that contained in q (Huang, 2007: 54). Huang
(2007: 55) points out that “‘but’ has three uses: (i) denial of expectation; (ii)
contrastive, and (iii) correction”, as illustrated in the examples below:
(i) Sara is poor but she is honest. (denial of expectation)
(ii) Our sales have gone up but theirs have gone down.
(contrastive)
(iii) That’s not mine but yours. (correction)

In pragmatics, the concept of conventional implicature has relatively

been neglected, and criticized as “theoretically superfluous or unnecessary”
(Culpeper and Haugh, 2014: 91). However, there are some properties that
make conventional implicatures different from other types of implicatures.
Unlike conversational implicatures, “conventional implicatures cannot be
cancelled: they are not determined by the speaker” (Valeika and Verikaitė,
2010: 76). For example, “John is not here yet”. Form (yet) one can imply
that the current situation will be different at a later time. Nonetheless, both
conventional and conversational implicatures are not detachable:
“implicatures are not lost by substituting synonymous structures, i.e. any
other structure which expresses more or less the same content will generate
the same implicature” (ibid.). Consider the example below:
Example 2.17 A: Has Sara got a boyfriend?
B: she has been a regular visitor to London recently / she
has been paying many visits to Cambridge lately. (The implicature is
“Sara has got a boyfriend”).

[Link] Conversational Implicatures

The concept of ‘conversational implicature’ is presented by Grice to indicate

the representations of “what is implicated” with reference to the
‘Cooperative Principle’, which he phrases as follows:

Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at

which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange
in which you are engaged (Grice [1975]1989: 26).

This notion of cooperation is a technical one which tries to cover the

expectations that people have when engaging in talk about the kinds of
things they will say, “how they will say things, how specific we need to be,
the order in which things are said, and so on” (Culpeper and Haugh, 2014:
93), and depending on the type of talk these expectations will change. The
cooperative principle is illustrated through the four “conversational
maxims”:
(i) “Maxim of quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true,
and specifically:
• Do not say what you believe to be false.
 • Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
(iii) Maxim of quantity
• Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current
purposes of the exchange.
• Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
(iii) Maxim of relevance: Make your contribution relevant.
(iiii) Maxim of manner: Be perspicuous, and specifically:
• Avoid obscurity.
• Avoid ambiguity.
• Be brief.
• Be orderly”. (Grice [1975]1989: 26–27)
Therefore, ‘Conversational implicatures’ are those assumptions which are
implicitly proposed by the speaker and inferred by the listener in a particular
situation. It is one of two main types of implicatures, which is an additional
meaning that is brought about when one of Grice’s maxims is violated
(Meyer, 2009: 224). For example:
Example 2.18 A: Do you like my new shirt and tie?
B: I like the shirt.
In this example, speaker B’s response may let speaker A to infer that s/he
did not like his/her tie because speaker B didn’t mention it in his/her answer.
Speaker B’s answer is not informative and it violates the maxim of quantity
which results in a conversational implicature (Meyer, 2009: 224).
Furthermore, conversational implicatures include special types of
implicatures that depend on linguistic structures, i.e., “the article, tense
forms”. For instance:
Example 2.19 A. What’s he doing over there?
B. He’s talking to a woman.
In this case, indefinite article (a) which is used by (woman) can imply that
the woman is unknown to a person, and it doesn’t need to any background
knowledge to the inference of the implicature.
Implicatures that don’t need to a special contextual input are known as
“generalized conversational implicature” (ibid.). Generalized conversational
implicature includes what is known as “scalar implicatures”. Consider the
example below:
Example 2.20 A. Do your students smoke?
B. Some do.
In dictionary, the word (some) means ‘a number of entities’, but in this
dialogue, (some) means ‘not all’. Yule (1996: 41) argues that, “the essence
of scalar implicature is that, when any form in a scale is asserted, the
negative of all forms higher on the scale is implicated”.
On the other hand, conversational implicatures which need to specific
contexts are known as “particularized conversational implicatures” (Yule,
1996: 43), as shown in the example below:
Example 2.21 A. Where are you going with the dog?
B. To the V.E.T.
The context of these speakers is that the dog knows what is the ‘vet’ and
hates to take it there, so B produced another word by spelled out ‘vet’ less
brief as V.E.T. Implicature that arises is that “he doesn’t want the dog to
know the answer” (ibid).
In a more recent development, Levinson (2000) distinguishes between
utterance-type meaning, utterance-token meaning in which “the utterance
type is the stereotype which is generally encoded in a typical speech
situation, whereas the utterance token is the nonce, unique speaker meaning
expressed in a particular message under particular circumstances”
(Urbanová, 2003: 24). According to Levinson (2000: 22) utterance-type
meaning involves representations that are not based on “direct computations
about speaker-intentions but rather on general expectations about how
language is normally used”. Utterance-type meaning is the meaning which is
“conveyed by utterances that are identical except that they are uttered on
different occasions by different speakers, that is, the meaning conveyed by
all tokens of one utterance type” (Allott, 2010: 193).
Levinson claims that a distinction between utterance-type and
utterance-token meaning is necessary to capture the facts about implicatures.
The main focus of neo-Griceans has been on generalized conversational
implicatures (GCI) (Culpeper and Haugh, 2014: 106), which are defined as
those implicatures that are normally carried by a certain way of saying
things (Allott, 2010: 224). Utterance-type meaning involves not just GCIs
but other kinds of formulaic meanings which is “short-circuited implicature”
(SCI) to account for meaning representations that are implicated through
“relevant usage conventions”. For example:
Example 2.22 “Allen: Hello?
John: Yeah, is Judy there?
Allen: Yeah, just a second.
(pause)
Judy: Hello” (Schegloff, 2007: 30).

In this conversation, John and Allen understand John’s ask “is Judy there?”
and Allen responds to his question and goes to bring Judy then they mean
more than what is said, especially, John implicates that he wants to speak
to Judy.
In short, utterance-type meaning involves short-circuited implicatures
(SCI), and generalized conversational implicatures (GCI) whereas utterance-
token meaning contains particularized conversational implicatures (PCI),
which “require some specific contextual knowledge in order to be inferred
by the hearer” (Culpeper and Haugh, 2014: 98).

2.2.2 Speech Act Theory

In everyday communication, people not only produce utterances composed
of merged forms and meaning, but they also perform actions by means of
such utterances. These kinds of actions which are performed through
utterances are known as speech acts.
The theory of speech act was proposed by Austin (1962) in his famous
book “How to do Things with Words”. Austin proposed that people not just
use language to say something but also to do things. According to this
theory, the speaker can perform many things by uttering utterances. In this
regard, Yule (1996: 47) stated that there are more specific labels of speech
acts in English such as apologizing, giving order, complaining, promising,
inviting someone, and requesting. In his early works, Austin (1962:6)
divided utterances into two types: (1) performative, which is an act that
performs an action, e.g. “open the door”; and (2) constative, which is an
utterance with a descriptive function, e.g. “the cat sat on the table”. In his
later formulation of speech act theory, Austin did not maintain the
distinction between performatives and constatives, as he argued that there
were no constatives but all utterances could be analyzed in terms of their
perfomativity. Then, he (ibid.) classified all speech acts into three types: (1)
illocutionary act which is “the act of saying a particular sentence with a
particular meaning” (Allott, 2010: 178); (2) locutionary act which is “the act
performed in making the utterance, such as promising, requesting, stating,
warning or betting” (ibid.); and (3) the perlocutionary act which is “the act
of bringing about certain effects by means of the utterance” (ibid.).
On the other hand, Searle (1969) further developed the theory of
speech acts; and he (1979: 12-17) classified illocutionary speech acts into:
assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations. He (ibid)
explains these types of speech act as follows:
(i) Assertives: those speech acts in which “commit the speaker to the
truth of what is said: assert, aver, boast, claim, report” (Cruse,
2006:168), e.g. “the earth is flat”.
(ii) Directives: those types of speech acts in which speakers use
language to make someone else to perform something, e.g. “open the
window”.
(iii) Commissives: they are speech acts which have “the effect of
committing the speaker to some action in the future: promise,
undertake, offer, threaten” (ibid.), e.g. “I’ll call you”.
(iv) Expressives: such types of speech acts in which the speakers
express their feeling. They express the psychological state such as
pleasure, pain, likes, dislikes, joy or sorrow, e.g. “John is so happy”.
(v) Declaratives: those types of speech acts in which speakers use
language “to produce a change of some sort in the world” (Cruse,
2006:169), e.g. “Boss: you’re fired”.

In terms of explicitness, there are two types of speech acts: direct and
indirect. An utterance is considered as direct speech act when “there is a
direct relationship between the structure and the communicative function of
the utterance” (Yule, 1996: 55). Yet, when there is mismatch between the
structure and function, the speech act is known as indirect speech act. In this
case, the speaker may mean one thing ‘by’ saying something else, as shown
in the example below:
2.23 John: "Would you like to meet me for coffee?"
Peter: "I have class."

In the example above, Peter indirectly rejects John’s request to meet him. He
does not explicitly state the proposition “I can’t meet you”, but he implicates
that he can’t see John, citing the excuse that he has a class. Peter’s intended
meaning is arrived at by taking his speech as an indirect speech act
interpreted via an implicature.
In addition, there are other ways in which an addresser can mean more
than the linguistic meaning of words. For instance, “Third battalion will
retake the ridge by nightfall”. It can be a threat, a prediction or an order, or,
with different intonation, a question. In this case, the differences between an
order, question, and statement are based on a difference in illocutionary
force. Subsequently, “the illocutionary force intended by a speaker may go
beyond the words that the speaker has uttered (Cruse, 2006: 5), and the
listener of the sentence in the latter example, has to infer from clues in the
context what force is meant by the speaker (ibid.). Besides, Culpeper and
Haugh (2014: 168) state that illocutionary force depends on the rest of the
discourse and the context”, for example, I promise “I’ll withhold your
pocket money” is considered as a threat, not a promise, taking into
consideration the general contextual input of the interaction.
Culpeper and Haugh (2014: 168) argue “the issue of form, and
whether it matches a particular illocutionary force, is pertinent to the
apparent correspondence between grammatical sentence type (or form) and
speech act (or illocutionary force)”. In English, there are three types of
sentences which correspond to three speech acts, as illustrated in table (2.2):
Table (2.2) Sentence type and speech act correspondences:
Sentence type Example Speech act

Imperative Finish your homework! Command

Interrogative Have you finished your homework? Question/inquiry

Declarative My homework is finished. Assertion

(Adopted from Culpeper and Haugh, 2014: 168)

Although this may seem straightforward, in actual interactions the mismatch

between sentence types and speech act presents itself as a serious analytical
problem. As shown in the table (2.3) there are mismatches between requests
and the interrogative and declarative sentence types:
Table (2.3) Sentence type and speech act mismatches:
Sentence type Example Speech act

Imperative Pass me the salt. Request

Interrogative Can you give me the salt? Request

Declarative This could do with a little Request

salt.
 (Adopted from Culpeper and Haugh, 2014: 168)

Notably, “give me the salt” is direct speech acts whereas “Can you give me
the salt?” is indirect speech acts. Thus, these utterance-types differ in terms
of how directly the speech act is performed (ibid.).
Blum-Kulka and her colleagues (cited in Culpeper and Haugh, 2014:
169) propose an argument to account for “direct/indirect speech acts”, and
how “indirect speech acts” work. Blum-Kulka and her colleagues propose
nine strategies of (in)directness:
 Direct (impositives)
1. Mood derivable (e.g. Give me a hand)
2. Performatives (e.g. I ask you to give me a hand)
3. Hedged performatives (e.g. Might I ask you to give me a hand?)
4. Obligation statements (e.g. You must give me a hand)
5. Want statements (e.g. I want you to give me a hand)
 Conventionally indirect
6. Suggestory formulae (e.g. Why don’t you give me a hand?)
7. Query preparatory (e.g. Can you give me a hand?)

 Non-conventionally indirect (hints)

8. Strong hints (e.g. This would be easier if somebody gave me a hand)
9. Mild hints (e.g. This is going to take me ages to do) (Culpeper and Haugh,
2014: 169)

2.2.3 Pragmatics of Tropes in Proverbs

Proverbs are known to have many types of figurative expressions. The
linguistic expression is said to be figurative aspect, if its meaning somehow
differs from its literal meaning (Cruse, 2006: 70). Abrams (1999: 96) states
that figurative language can be classified into two types: first ‘figures of
thought’ (i.e. tropes), which means "turns" or "conversions" in which “words
or phrases are used in a way that effects a conspicuous change in what we
take to be their standard meaning” (metaphors and puns), and secondly,
‘figures of speech’ (i.e. rhetorical figures or schemes) in which “the
departure from standard usage is not primarily in the meaning of the words,
but in the order or syntactical pattern of the words” (ibid: 97).
Tropes are meaningful deviations, which one can observe and
interpret through his/her prior knowledge, and they are implicit offering a
cognitive challenge. The use of trope is the most recognized characteristic of
proverbs, used to communicate meaning implicitly and effectively. Adams
(1810: 311-312, cited by Harris, 2013:10), in his lecture “Lectures on
Rhetoric and Oratory”, states:
Hence, it has been contended, that there are only four primary
tropes; the metaphor, founded upon similitude; the metonymy
founded upon the relation between cause and effect; the
synecdoche, standing on the relation between a whole and its
parts; and irony, the basis of which is opposition.
There are other kinds of tropes but the four tropes below are the most
common. The remainder of the chapter will focus on their pragmatic
interpretations.

[Link] Metaphor & Simile

Generally speaking, metaphor and simile are closely related tropes as both
are based on similitude and relatedness. In both metaphor and simile “one
thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally
denoting another thing, idea, or action”. (Baldick, 2001: 153). However,
difference between them is that this relatedness is explicit in simile whereas
it is implicit in metaphor.
There are different theories of metaphor; some of them are emotive
theories that look at the metaphor’s role as emotional expressions lacking
cognitive content. Emotive theory views metaphor as deviant from the use of
language and it hasn’t any real cognitive import or meaning. On the other
hand, Cognitive theories give emphasis to the cognitive aspects and effects
of metaphors. Other theories view metaphor as involving literal falsity or
violation of semantic categories. In this sense, interactive theories of
metaphor view metaphoric expressions as the result of the interaction of two
concepts (Way, 1991: 30).
Some scholars consider metaphor as conversational implicature as
Grice (1991: 33-37), then Levinson (1995: 147-162) follows him and
summarizes Grice’s account of metaphor interpretation arguing that
“metaphor can be characterized by its performance situation and by the way
it undergoes realization as described by pragmatics”. He (ibid.) also adds
that “metaphor can be characterized by thinking in analogies, a mean of
understanding common to all human beings and, above all, the reason for
our desire to square inconcity with reality” (Levinson, 1995: 147-162 citied
by Kessler, 2018: 90). Along the same line, Abraham (1998: 54-57) also
accounts for metaphor as conversational implicature. Metaphor is a
conversational implicature because it contains the same distinguishing
features of implicature, as stated by Meibauer (2001: 31-49):
 (i) calculability: means that metaphor contains the fact that
“understanding of a particular metaphor can logically be deduced from
metaphorised concept itself and its context, as well as, by using the
principles of cooperation and conversational maxims” ( Kessler, 2018: 88).
(ii) variability: another feature of metaphor is variability because the
meaning of phrases or words is changed based on their context. While only
the meaning of semantic form is dependent on the context, which means that
a word needs a context to become a metaphor and without context there is
no metaphor (ibid.).
(iii) defeasibility or (cancellability): in dialogue, conversational
implicature will be cancelled without misunderstanding or sense of
strangeness. As Searle (1994: 40-41) states “the participants in conversation
who mainly refer to the illocutions of their interlocutors are able to ‘betray’
the illocutionary force of metaphor, by reacting to the metaphor in a way
that is coherent with its iconicity” (Kessler, 2018: 88).
(v) constancy under negation: it is another feature of metaphor
which means that the meaning of conversational implicature doesn’t change
after the negation of its clause or sentence (ibid.). In this respect, Kurz
(1988: 14) claims:
the negation of metaphorical utterance, e.g. “ the moon is not a lemon”
doesn’t negate a literal meaning but the intended specific meaning of the
metaphor (…) no one would really think that the utterance “ the moon is
not a lemon” should be taken literally. It is also worth pointing out that
metaphors remain metaphors even as they are under negation.

Moreover, Davis (2016: 60) presents metaphor as a conversational

implicature arguing that:
 implicating that something has certain attributes A by uttering a non-
comparative sentence without meaning S, where the speaker assumes
either (i) that having A would make it similar in some respects to how it
typically would be if it were as described in S, or (ii) that being as in S
would make it similar in some respects to how it typically would be if it
had A.
Now consider the following example in with a proverb with a metaphorical
expression is used:
Example 2.24 John: I think Marry and Peter love each other?
Steve: I think so. “Love and a cough cannot be hid”.
In this example Steve describes love with reference to cough show his
agreement with John’s believe that Marry and Peter love each other. He
doesn’t literally say that but he uses a proverb with a metaphorical element
to second his friend’s idea. “Love and a cough cannot be hid” includes a
metaphor in which love is described as carrying a feature of cough which
cannot be hidden. Steve by using metaphorical proverb implicates that it is
impossible to conceal the fact that they in love and sooner or later people
will know their relationship. He really does not explicitly state this but he
implies it through highlighting a specific similitude between love and cough.
On the other hand, metaphor is considered as a type of analogy which
is related to the other figure of speech in order to achieve their effect through
association, comparison, and similarity such as allegory, hyperbole, and
simile (Board, 2014: 7). Cruse (2006: 165) argues that, “simile involves an
explicit comparison between two things or actions”. Simile includes the
word like or as, e.g. “to love somebody (something) as the devil loves holy
water”. Simile as metaphor is used to make comparison, and they have the
same implicature but simile is conveyed by using a comparative sentence,
including like or as, e.g. “love as a blind person” (simile), and “love is
blind” (metaphor) have the same implicature which implicate that the person
in love cannot see his/ her beloved’s faults.

[Link] Metonymy & Synecdoche

Metonymy is another main type of figures of speech, which is “the use of a
property to refer to its possessor, or an object associated with it” (Allott:
2010: 125), e.g. “he drank the whole bottle.” In this example, the speaker
uses bottle to refer to its content. A more specific type of metonymy is
known as synecdoche in which “the related object is a part of the subject”
(Davis, 2016: 60), e.g. “the beard wants more coffee”. Synecdoche is the
relation between part and whole which is distinct from metonymy. Davis
(2016: 60) argues that metonymy, and by extension synecdoche involves
“implicating that something has a property ascribed to a related object by S
without meaning S”.
Metonymy is not only a linguistic phenomenon but also a cognitive
one. Metonymy as a conceptual phenomenon was first studied by the
cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) in their seminal
book “Metaphors We Live By,” in which they (ibid.) claim that “the
linguistic function of metonymy is one of indirect reference” with cognitive
impacts on how we conceptualize the world around us. For example, in the
proverb “the way to a man's heart is through his stomach” there is a
relationship where one entity “stands for” another as in proverb where the
word stomach refers to delicious food not the stomach itself to highlight how
women can win a man's heart by cooking delicious food for him. Metonymy
is usually represented by “the x for y schema”, in which x symbolizes the
source (vehicle) and y represents the target of the metonymy (ibid.).
Consider the following love proverb:
 Example 2.25 Love is a journey
In this example, conceptual metaphor consists of lover = travelers and the
love relationship =vehicles, and lover’s goal= destination.
Metonymy is mainly considered as a “referential phenomenon where
the name of a referent is used to stand for another referent” (Panther and
Thornburg, 2003: 2). Moreover, ‘stand for’ relation feature of metonymy
shows that metonymy is a “substitution relation”, as can be seen in this
example:
Example 2.26 General Motors is on strike.

Here, the name of company (General Motors) is used to refer to its workers
who are on strike.
Panther and Thornburg (2003: 7) show some point of convergence
between metonymy research and pragmatic analysis, wherein the common
goal for research in pragmatics and cognitive linguistics revolves around the
making inferences to pick up the referents of metonymic expressions. In this
context, there is a similarity between Lakoff (1987) who calls metonymy as
“metonymic models”, and Levinson (2000: 37) in his theory of “generalized
conversational implicature” as he accounts for metonymy through his I-
heuristic (where I stands for “Informativeness”). In this sense, the claim,
made by Lakoff (1987), that “the concept mother metonymically evokes the
subconcept housewife mother” is consistent with Levinson’s (2000: 37)
argument that “lexical items routinely implicate stereotypical pragmatic
default readings”. In this case, Levinson links metonymy to Grice’s (1975)
maxim of Quantity, arguing that “metonymic links are considered as
“natural inference schemas”, which are available for the interlocutor in a
communication situation. For Grice, conversational implicatures should be
able to be “worked out”, and metonymies as “natural inference schemas”
can easily meet this requirement (Panther and Thornburg, 2003: 8).

[Link] Verbal Irony

The term ‘irony’ is defined as, “a figure of speech in which the intended
meaning of an expression is usually some kind of opposite of the literal
meaning” (Cruse, 2006: 90). There are different definitions for the term
irony as argued by Childs and Fowler (2006: 123), who state that:
a mode of discourse for conveying meanings different from, and usually
opposite to, the professed or ostensible ones. There are several kinds of
irony, though they fall into two main categories: situational and verbal. All
irony, however, depends for its effectiveness on the belief in and
exploitation of the difference and distance between words or events and
their contexts.

One basic type of irony is known as ‘verbal irony’ which is defined as

“a statement in which the meaning that a speaker implies differs sharply
from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed” (Abrams, 1999: 135). Some
scholars (Booth, 1974; Murfin & Ray 2003) consider verbal irony as
‘rhetorical trope’, since it says one thing but means something different.
Additionally, Murfin and Ray (2003: 222) characterize verbal irony as,
“discrepancy between what a speaker or a writer says and what s/he believes
to be true. More specifically, a speaker or writer using verbal irony will say
the opposite of what s/he actually believes to be true”. According to Cuddon
(2013: 372), “verbal irony involves saying what one does not mean”.
Traditionally, irony is considered as a trope, in which the literal
meaning of the word in question is changed to non-literal (figurative)
meaning. As Grice (1975:53) explains verbal irony from maxims
perspective, arguing that when a speaker uses an ironical statement, s/he
flouts the maxim of quality to indicate the opposite of what the speakers are
literary said. The hearer needs to find a related proposition which restores
the use of maxim, in such case, the related proposition is the opposite of
what a speaker said, and it is as an implicature of the utterance. For example,
when using the utterance “John's a fine friend” to mean “John is not a good
friend”, the speaker violates the maxim of truthful (quality) by saying
something which is opposite to the reality of John’s character.
Another view is that irony is a kind of ‘echoic mention’ in which a
previously stated utterance or belief is repeated by speakers which is
recognized in context as conveying ironic meaning. In fact, “the listener
finds it easier to process and judge the ironic meaning of utterances, when
they echo or paraphrase some earlier statement or commonly – held belief”
(Gibbs and Colston, 2001: 191). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 239) state
“verbal irony invariably involves the implicit expression of an attitude, and
the relevance of an ironical utterance invariably depends, at least in part, on
the information it conveys about the speaker’s attitude to the opinion
echoed”.
Verbal irony is usually made by syntactic or semantic deviation of
norms, and the understanding of such kind of irony is based on a recognition
of the linguistic, social, moral, and context. In conversation, it may be
possible through tone of voice to understand the meaning of the word, for
example, the word ‘clever’ can be used to mean ‘stupid’ as in in the
utterance “He’s a clever chap”, but it cannot be said that it is one meaning of
the word ‘clever’, the writer must convey his/ her sense indirectly (Childs
and Fowler, 2006: 124). Thus, “irony is an art of juxtaposition and
indirection, relying for its success on such techniques as understatement,
paradox, puns and other forms of wit in the expression of incongruities”
(ibid.).
In the case of irony, implicature is the opposite of ‘what is said’.
Davis (2016: 59) illustrates that “implicating a contrary of “what the speaker
said” (S) to make light of, belittle, or mock it”. Consider the example below:
Example 2.27 John: How’s the weather over there?
Peter: The weather is wonderful.
In this example, Peter implicates that the weather is awful by using irony but
he does not literally mention that. John can infer Peter’s intended meaning
through the context that it is a hot day in summer and Peter is sweating.
Like metaphor, the comprehension of verbal irony is based on
pragmatic inference; Grice (1975]1989[: 34) argues that irony and metaphor
are the result of maxim exploitation, in which the maxim of truthful is
flouted.

2.2.4 Speech Acts in Proverbs

Proverbs that are used in everyday conversation can be typical examples of

speech acts. Huang (2007: 39) mentions that “the uttering of a sentence is,
or is part of, an action within the framework of social institutions and
conventions. Put in slogan form, saying is (part of) doing, or words are
(part of) deeds”. As rightfully indicated by Lutfi (2007: 296), proverbs are
not only the words that are said literally but they are used to offer conduct,
give advice to people either to do something or avoid of doing things. In
this regard, Yanga (1977:130) asserts that “the reason behind treating
proverbs in terms of speech acts is the belief that the user of proverbs is not
only uttering words but performing linguistic acts for a social purpose in a
particular speech community. Proverbs ... are statements that function as
deeds”.
Furthermore, Dairo (2010: 441) clarifies in his study about “Yoruba
proverbs in terms of speech act analysis” that “any utterances made by
language users in whatever form are speech acts; therefore, a proverb, as a
rhetorical variable, is used to perform certain acts”. Proverbs are seen as
speech acts since they are used in everyday conversation for confirming,
persuading, warning, advising people. When people use proverbs, they
imply their intention, which could be inferred by the listener by virtue of the
context in which the proverbs are used, as shown in the love proverb below:
Example 2.28 John: “Did you know that Mary is dating Peter?
Sara: Yeah, I don’t know why she’s dating him.
John: Maybe he has a lot of money.
Sara: Huh. Well, I guess love is blind”1
Under this condition, Sara uses the proverb “Love is blind” to convey the
message to her friend that Mary isn’t dating Peter for money. She does not
mention that directly but the listener (John) can infer her intended
meaning. According to Searle’s classification of illocutionary acts, “love is
blind”, in this context, is an expressive because Sara uses this proverb to
express her disappointment in Mary’s inability to see Peter for what he
really is.

2.2.5 Implicit Meaning in Proverb

Proverbs always contain two kinds of meaning, one is their literal or
primary meaning, and the other is their deeper or implicated meaning. The
implicated meaning is not transparent, and listeners, in order to interpret
1
[Link]
such proverbs, should have social and cultural background knowledge
(Lauer, 2000: 56). Consider the following English and Arabic love
proverbs:
Example 2.29 Marriage is a lottery.
Example 2.30 ‫روحان في جسد‬
(Two souls in single body)

The meaning of these proverbs are not fixed but they vary according to
their context of use. The literal meaning of the proverb (2.29) is that
marriage is like a lottery but its implicit meaning is that marriage has the
same characteristics of the lottery, which is based on the luck of the draw.
Thus, whether a marriage was successful or failure depends on luck.
Likewise, the Arabic love proverbs have both literal and implicated
meaning, as example (2.30), its literal meaning is that one person has
double souls, which is impossible in the real world, but the implicit
meaning is that they are two persons who love each other so much that
they cannot be separated. From semantic perspective, such proverbs are
odd but the implicit meanings they communicate are pragmatically
appropriate in the conventionalized context of their use. Thus, each
proverb in certain context has at least “one strong implicature and one
explicature” (Toews, 2019: 70).
However, the meanings of proverbs are not fixed and they can be
changed across different contexts. The speakers may modify the meanings
of proverbs in order to become appropriate to their ad hoc context of use.
Proverb users may delete, paraphrase or transfer element of the proverbs
they use in order to reframe or redefine the situation. (Lauer, 2000: 57).

2.2.6 Recontextualization & Proverb Use

The concept of recontextualization is based on the concepts of context and
contextualization. Context is a basic factor in understanding and
interpreting an utterance. It may consist of: (i) “preceding and following
utterances and/or expressions” (‘co-text’), (ii) “the immediate physical
situation”, (iii) “the wider situation, including social and power relations”,
and (iv) “knowledge presumed shared between speaker and hearer” (Cruse,
2006: 35). In this respect, Fetzer (2004: 4) states that context does not only
contain linguistic, but it also includes “cognitive, social and sociocultural”
contexts.
On the other hand, Contextualization is “a dynamic-process by which
the participants make relevant, or otherwise show, the meaning of the
context in their actions and situated interactions” (Gumperz, 1992: 39).
The theory of contextualization is associated with the name and work of
Gumperz (1982, 1992) who defines contextualization as:
speakers’ and listeners’ use of verbal and nonverbal signs to relate to
what is said at any one time and in any one place to knowledge acquired
through past experience, in order to retrieve the presupposition they must
rely on to maintain conversational involvement and assess what is
intended (1992: 230).

In this view, contextualization refers to the process of interpretation in

which the speakers and listeners are managed when they are engaging in
interaction, and contextualization cues are such verbal and nonverbal signs
which prompt “contextual presuppositions” (Gumperz 1982: 131).
Linell (1998: 86) asserts that all discourses are “contextualized”
(they are always built in some actual context), and adds that “when pieces
of discourse are taken out of their original context, and used ... in a new
context” they are thereby “re-contextualized”. Then, he (1998: 154)
defines recontextualization as “the dynamic transfer-and-transformation of
something from one discourse/text in context ... to another” (Linell, 1998:
154). The meaning of recontextualized discourse will change when it is
occurred in another context. The main examples of recontextualization can
be seen in the proverbs that such ancient proverbs live again through the
process of recontextualization. Each proverb has a particular context, for
instance, Shakespeare’s play (1590) “A Midsummer Night's Dream” is
love story whose characters (Lysander and Hermia) encounter many
troubles in their love because Hermia's father insists that his daughter
marries another person. Lysander visited Hermia and told her that “the
course of true love never did run smooth”, which means that lovers will
face many difficulties but together they can overcome them. This proverb
becomes famous and popular in English-speaking communities. Now
imagine the same proverb but in another context, for example:
Example 2.31
Sara: why are you so depressed?
Peter: I gave up everything to be with her but her family
doesn’t agree on our relationship.
Sara: “The course of true love never did run smooth”.
In such an interaction, Sara’s use of the proverb redefines the context by
using a speech act conventionally associated with a specific context, i.e.
the Shakespearean play. Sara’s use of this proverb can be considered as
recontextualization, whose aim is to redefine the context of their
conversation in a way that offers an emotional support to Peter. This
recontexualization allows this proverb to “come alive” again. Thus,
recontextualization in proverb use is an inevitable pragmatic process that
results in redefining the context of use and enriching the meaning of the
proverb, with more locally contextual information. Indeed, using any
proverb in real communication has a recontextualizing effect and conveys
two types of implicit meanings: utterance-type meaning, associated with
the proverb’s conventionalized context of use, and utterance-token
meaning, associated with the ad hoc context in which the proverb is
recontextualized (see 2.5.2).

2.3 Proverbs and Proverb Studies

Proverbs are part of everyday spoken language, transmitted from one

generation to another by words until they are recorded and became a treasure
of folklore for future generations (Karagiorgos, 1999: vii). Proverbs are
often considered to be “traditional items of folklore” (Norrick,1985: 30).
According to the Oxford dictionary, a proverb is “a well-known phrase or
sentence that states the truth or gives advice” ( 2003: 345). This term is
taken from Latin “pro-verbium” (“pro” meaning “in front of” and
“Verbium” meaning “word”) which means that proverbs may replace
ordinary words. Fergusson (2000: 137-138) claims that, “every culture and
language has their own proverbs, which belong to the popular culture and
tradition of their language”.

Collecting, classifying and studying proverbs represent a traditional

scholarly interest. The first proverb collections can be found in ancient
Egypt, around 2500 B.C. More interestingly, the Old Testament includes
900 proverbs belonging to “King Solomon of Israel” (10th century B.C.).
Additionally, Aristophanes of Byzantium (257-180 BC), a well-known
ancient scholar, collected six books of proverbs. The philologist Didymus of
Alexandria also collected proverbs in thirteen volumes. However, the Greek
philosopher Aristotle was the first one to have engaged more systematically
in the arrangement and classification of proverbs (384-322 B.C.). Aristotle
regarded proverbs as a continuation of ancient wisdom: “Proverbs are...
elements of old philosophy which survived thanks to their brevity and
dexterity” (Aristotle, cite by Karagiorgos,1999: vii).

The study and collection of proverbs are known as Paremiology.

Paremiology is a topic of research interest in philosophy, linguistics, and the
study of folklore (Singh, 2016: 2). This kind of study can be derived from
the Greek Philosopher Aristotle who had explored different aspects of
proverbs. Paremiology involves two subfields of study: paremiography and
paremiology. Paremiographers are interested in collecting and classifying
proverbs. Paremiologists, on the other hand, ask questions about “the
definition, form, structure, style, content, function, meaning and value of
proverbs” (Mieder, 2004: xii). Paremiologists are generally interested in
proverbs, drawing on areas such as “anthropology, art, communication,
culture, folklore, history, literature, philology, psychology, religion, and
sociology” (ibid: xiii).

Because of value of proverbs as indicators of societal norms, modern

psychologists study proverbs as part of their diagnostic testing material and
even proverbs help them to test for “personality traits, mood, schizophrenia,
depression, abstracting function, cerebral disease, and cognition”
(Kerschen,1998: 5). Not only the psychologists who use proverbs to look
into the human mind but also folklorists (especially those interested in folk
literature), and linguists (especially those interested in the ethnic and sexist
bias of language); proverbs can help them to provide many answers for their
field-specific questions (Seitel, 1969).

2.3.1 Characteristics of Proverbs

Proverbs are like jokes, or fairy tales neither fall from the sky nor are they
are products of the mythical soul of the folk, but intentionally or
unintentionally they are made by the human. Proverbs are pieces of cultural
wisdom that are creative “in form and idea” invented first in order to apply
them to particular situations (Mieder and Dundes,1981: 3). Moreover, Ibn
Ezra (1924, cited by Flavell and Linda, 2011: 3) argues that any proverb has
“three characteristics: few words, good sense, and a fine image”. Mieder
(2004: 3) explores the difficulty of providing an adequate definition for the
concept of proverb; he eventually defines it as “a short, generally known
sentence of the folk which contains wisdom, truth, morals, and traditional
views in a metaphorical, fixed and memorizable form and which is handed
down from generation to generation”. Along the same line, Borowska (2014:
29) mentions that fixed linguistic forms can be considered as proverbs when
they are traditional, powerful, stable, formulaic and identifiable with figure
of speech.

This means that there are common features that can distinguish
proverb from non-proverbial idiomatic expressions. These features include
their transmission of wisdom across time, use figure of speech, strong
imagery and grammatical and rhetorical devices that make the proverbs
memorable. Norrick (1985:31) characterizes proverbs as “self-contained,
pithy, traditional expressions with didactic content and fixed, poetic form”.

[Link] Self-containedness
One of the criteria to distinguish proverbs from proverbial phrases is that
they should be self-contained sayings (Seiler, 1922: 2). This means neither
of their fundamental grammatical elements can be substituted (Norrick,1985:
32). This means that proverbs need to form as complete grammatical
sentences. In this sense, some proverbial phrases, such as “to kick over the
traces”, although have traditional and figurative forms should be excluded
from the proverb’s class, because are not complete grammatical units
(Borowska, 2014:441).

Alternatively, other scholars, including Seiler as Milner (1969a),

Barley (1972), and Abrahams (1972), conceptualize a proverb as a complete
statement (Norrick (1985:32). This is also emphasized by Dundes (1975:
970), who conceptualizes proverbs as propositional statements. This means
that proverbs should be co-extensive containing a logical proposition, with a
subject and predicate. It seems more adequate to adopt Norrick’s (1985:32)
conceptualization of proverbs as complete grammatical units to avoid
limiting their pragmatic function to statements only. This view is well
articulated by Taylor (1934), whom argues that proverbs should be
envisaged as full grammatical sentences. He then uses the term “sentence”
rather than “proposition, statement” or “self-contained saying”.

[Link] Traditionality

Traditionality can be regarded as a fundamental characteristic of the proverb.

Many scholars consider “the traditional nature of proverbs as items of
folklore, including their common use in recurring verbal performances”
(Norrick, 1985: 39). Abraham (1969: 106) defines proverbs as “traditional
items of knowledge which arise in recurring performances”. Such a
definition highlights the relationship between folklore and traditionality.
Because proverbs are repetitive and traditional, they are considered as
“authorless, sourceless and also as non-literary, non-learned” (Norrick,
1985: 39). Since “proverbs are linguistic units, they must be oral even
though they may be recorded in writing” (Norrick, 1985: 36 cited in
Borowska, 2014: 33).

[Link] Fixed-form

Unlike folktales and jocks, proverbs always occur in fixed forms. Glazer
(1987: vii) indicates that proverbs have fixed forms which means that they
always come in specific set of forms and structures, and if they are not in
fixed form, they cannot be considered as proverbs. For instance, using
“Business is business” in a suitable context will be clear, while if someone
says “Business is the market” rather than “Business is business” this cannot
be considered as proverb because this proverb has a fixed form familiar to
the audience. Taylor (1962) indicates that “rigidity of form” can be
considered as one of the most essential characteristics of proverbs. Other
scholars also invoke the idea of fixed form in their definitions and
characterization of proverbs. Barley (1972), for instance, refers to the
“limited restructuring and variation” in proverbs, and Dundes (1964)
distinguishes fixed-phrase types of folklore (proverb, song) from free-phrase
genres (joke, riddle).

The significance of this characteristic of proverb is derived from the

need for proverbs to remain recognizable in context. Speakers use proverbs
as units and believe that their listeners are able to understand them. Despite
lexical and grammatical varieties, listeners can identify proverbs, because
they are highly coded and over-coded. This is because proverbs’ “structures
are marked and they bear greater social and psychological significance than
do other set phrases” (Eco, 1972; 1976, cited in Borowska, 2014: 35).

However, Seiler (1922, cited in Borowska, 2014:35) argues that

fixedness cannot prevent changes over time and from one society to another.
Such variability makes different forms for a proverb in certain situations,
e.g. “Where/when one door shuts/is shut another opens/is opened and All
that glitters/glisters is not gold/All is not gold that glitters/glisters” (ibid.).

[Link] Didacticity

Proverbs always have didactic content. Didacticity is considered one of the

most important features of proverbs. Obviously, the main function of
proverb is to teach and instruct the listener. Proverbs often communicate an
expert advice that aims to inform readers about what they can face
if they do something. Subsequently, proverbs have a role in transmitting
wisdom and knowledge to people. Seiler (1922: 2-4) argues that didactic
tendency is the proverb definitional criterion. He clarifies didactic tendency
that is important for human knowledge and behavior. The didactic tendency
might be expressed with direct form like “Look before you leap” or an
indirect form “Soon gotten” (Borowska, 2014: 34). According to Firth
(1926: 265-66) “proverbs express an injunction in social behavior or
transmit the facts of experience” (Norrick, 1985: 41). In addition, Taylor
(1950: 902) describes proverbs as didactic and clarifying that they indicate a
course of action or have a factual statement.

Jolles (1930), on the other hand, rejects calling proverbs didactic in

the first direct sense but only permits the experimental perception of proverb
content as general observations. Hence, proverbs describe a social advice
communicated by their didactic forces or through their contexts of use.
Mieder (1996: 4) says that proverbs contain “wisdom, truths, morals, and
traditional views” that clearly covering all these aspects. Therefore,
whether or not speaker recognizes “the early bird catches the worm” as
description of previous experience, they may use this as a warning and their
hearer can understand this as advise (Borowska, 2014: 35).

The need for this didactic tendency should exclude those items that
were often included in the proverbs category, especially those connected to
particular situations such as “Long time no see” used for greeting. This kind
of saying that lacks any didactic content is best to remove from proverbs.
Absolutely, some proverbs carry direct didactic messages such as elements
of advice, for instance, “Put your best foot forward” or having indirect
didactic message like potential injunction that sum up past experiences, “in
First come, first served” (Borowska, 2014: 35).

[Link] Poetic Features

Some but not all proverbs contain poetic features as “rhyme, alliteration,
parallelism, and repetition” that these features make proverb more
recognizable and memorable for speaker and listener (Mckenzie, 1996: 5).
Barley (1972) separates literal conventional statements from “metaphorical
proverbs” and calls them maxims. Greimas (1970) makes a parallel variation
between “the figurative proverb” and “the literal dicton”. Taylor (1950) and
Hain (1963) regard metaphoricity as a common feature of proverb instead of
a defining attribute as such (Borowska, 2014: 37).
 Other scholars such as Seiler (1922) consider imagery as a matter of
degree instead of a complete dichotomy, so this differentiation between
proverbs and literal sayings should be gradual. Furthermore, most proverbs
can have literal to metaphoric interpretations. For instance, “It never rains
but it pours” may use in the literal context that reflects literal meaning as
raining or it can use metaphorically to mean “a streak of bad luck”
( Borowska, 2014: 37).

Like imagery, Prosody is also considered to be typical, but not

quintessential characteristics of proverbs. In addition, rhyme as in “Birds of
a feather flock together”, alliteration as in “Live and let live”, and assonance
as in “Strike while the iron is hot” are not quintessential characteristics of
proverbs. Taylor (1962 cited in Borowska, 2014: 37) identifies different
metrical patterns and parallelism feature of proverbs. He maintains that
prosody is an inclination for proverbs to show particular word-order
patterns, as “shorter elements first, longer elements toward the end”, in,
“Here today, gone tomorrow”. From a functional perspective, Borowska
(2014: 37) argues that prosody makes proverbs more memorable and
familiar in context.

2.3.2 Proverbs of Love

People can express their feeling through language using different types of
texts, such as poems, quotations and proverbs. Characteristically, proverbs
can be considered as cultural metaphors that are used by people to provide
useful advice as needed in particular situations. Thus, the proverbs of love
are said to show the reality of love as experienced by peoples and to give
people advices on how to deal with love. For instance, the proverb “Absence
makes the heart grow fonder” conveys wisdom linked to love experience
which means that the feeling of love intensified when the loved person is not
with the lover. Additionally, the proverb “Love will find a way” suggests that
people will experience love in some way sooner or later (Danesi, 2019: 67).

In every culture there are equivalent love proverbs, aphorisms, and

sayings creating a fabulous corpus of practical knowledge about love, which
anthropologists referred to as folk wisdom. Interestingly, Lover proverbs can
be distinguished from other types of proverbs by their focus on a variety of
human relations that typically revolve around affection. This seems
consistent with the lexical meaning of the word “love”. Oxford dictionary
defines the word ‘love’ as “a strong feeling of deep affection for someone or
something” (2003: 256).

2.3.3 Conceptualizing Love

Some researchers such as (Fehr & Russell, 1991; Hendrick & Hendrick,
1992; Lee, 1973) have debated that “it is not possible to create a universal
definition for the emotion of love because love means different things to
different people. Hence, each individual will have his or her own personal
definition of romantic love”.

Philosophers have sought to describe love as an inherent concept that

can be understood on its own. Thus, Taylor (1979, cited in Kovecses,
2004:126) defines love as “being constituted by (mutual) sacrifice, affection,
longing, and interest”, whereas another philosopher, Newton-Smith (1973),
argues that “the concept of love consists primarily of care, liking, respect,
attraction, affection, and self-sacrifice”. According to Danesi (2019: 3) love
means “someone to present a strong feeling and emotional desire toward
somebody or something”, and he adds that individuals represent their feeling
of love through language, art and myths (ibid:21). This is why love and
language are indeed interrelated, as people can express their emotion as love,
and hate through language. Kovecses (2004: 122) claims that “emotion
concepts such as love are best viewed as being constituted by a large number
of cognitive models centered around a small number of prototypical
models”.

The conceptual contents of the different understandings of love are

derived from “metaphors, metonymies” and what Kovecses (2004: 122)
calls ‘‘related concepts”. These sources can be defined by looking at the
words and phrases that are typically used every day by native speakers of a
language in order to express or communicate emotional experiences such as
“anger, fear, happiness, love, and so forth” (ibid.). A linguistic analysis of
the love language proves that the central metaphor for love is “unity of two
complementary parts”. The metaphorical implications for love
conceptualization are various, and therefore there are many “unity related
linguistic expressions of love” (Kovecses, 2004: 122).

Metaphors are one of the ways of conceptualizing love that are one of
a figurative terms and expressions which describe emotion (love, hate). Love
(as an abstract concept) is represented through metaphors which are
considered as part of culture. Consequently, the linguistic metaphors of love
are affected by culture. For example, “A monkey is a gazelle in its mother’s
eye” this Arabic proverb metaphorically advises us that “the beholder, rather
than an absolute value, determines the beauty of something” (Farghal, 2019:
14). The use of ‘monkey’ in this example shows the negative attitude
towards it in Arab society that refers to ‘ugliness’ (ibid.). There is a
difference between “linguistic metaphors (metaphorical expressions) are
expressed through language; and conceptual metaphor (metaphorical
concept) are mental representation explain how two words or expressions
from different fields seem to be related at the basic cognitive level” (Thu and
Hoa, 2019: 109). In the metaphor “love is/as a journey”, for instance, “love
is a journey” is the name of the mapping or conceptual metaphor; ‘love’ is
the target domain, and journey is the source domain (ibid.). According to
Lakoff and Johnson (1980 cited in Kovecses, 2004: 4 ), “the metaphorical
expressions are manifestations of conceptual metaphors”. Conceptual
metaphors involve conceptual mapping across two different domains. One is
more physical or concrete (source domain) than the other which is usually
more abstract (target domain). The mapping is generated to explain the more
abstract concept through the more concrete one (Kovecses, 2004: 4).

Love can also be expressed by other figurative term and expression as

metonymy. Linguistic terms that identify love’s physiological, expressive,
and behavioral responses are called metonymy. Kovecses (2004: 123) claims
that “there is a stand-for relationship between these and the concept of love
as a whole” (i.e., the part can stand for the whole). Kovecses (2004: 5)
explains that “the purpose of metonymy is to provide mental access to a
domain through a part of the same domain (or vice versa) or to a part of a
domain through another part in the same domain”. For instance, "Absence
makes the heart grow fonder”, the word ‘heart’ reflects emotions and
feelings of someone who falls in love (heart is the part of body) (Knowles
and Moon, 2006: 40).

2.3.4 Proverbs of Love in English and Arabic

Proverbs represent an interesting category of idiomatic expressions; they
reflect both the universality and cultural specificity of human experience. On
the one hand, proverbs produce and present the cultural heritage of particular
society. On the other hand, they reflect universal realities of human life,
common conventions and beliefs of human life, and shared values such as
ambition, honesty, love, tolerance, affection, loyalty and family relationships
(Brosh, 2013: 21). Proverbs are said to convey cultural knowledge in all
languages, however they can be differ in their significance in each culture
(Al-khresheh, 2018:159).

The idea that people who use different languages think in different
ways, is originally expounded in (the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). Based on
this idea, the concept of love itself can be interpreted in different ways in
Arabic and English, because language is a part of culture and it is influenced
by it. Al-Shehab (2016: 10) indicates that languages such as Arabic and
English are not just different linguistically, but are also different in culture,
and this is especially evident in proverbs. For instance the following Arabic
proverbs: “He who has children does not die” and “Better a good girl than a
scandalous boy” illustrates the deeply-rooted concept that a baby boy is
preferred than a baby girl in the Arabic culture. Another example of how
language and culture are inextricably linked in proverbs is the proverb:
“Marriage is entanglement”; this proverb conveys the idea that marriage in
the Arab culture is not a matter of two persons getting married but it is a
relationship between families (Farghal, 2019: 73).

In the Arab culture, people may subconsciously use proverbs in

everyday life in their speech, whereas in other culture as English, they are
thought to be old-fashioned. According to the study conducted by Ahmed
(2005), it is very popular in Sudan to use proverbs while it's rare in the UK
to use them. She speculates that in the Arab culture proverbs are used by
uncreative persons because they are ready-made expressions, whereas in the
West, proverbs are used only by conservative people ( ibid: 15). Barakat
(1980: 1) states that “of the several genres of oral literature common in the
Arab world, none is more pervasive than proverbs". This reflects the value
of verbal expressions as one of the basic features of Arabic culture. In Arab
society, the use of proverbs shows the speaker’s (writer) fluency and his/her
capacity to express oneself in a fluent rhetorical way. Barakat (1980: 7)
argues that “Arabs take vast pride in being able to invoke proverbs when the
need arises and pay great respect to any person who is capable of using these
sayings correctly”.

Like poetry, proverbs are more close to the Arabs’ heart than the other
legacies. The British colonial administrator, H.R.P. Dickson (1951: 366)
mentions that “the Arab is forever quoting proverbs or sayings of some poet
or other, and he seems to enjoy this almost as much as storytelling”.
Abdelkafi (1968) agrees with the claim that Arabs use proverbs more than
other nations. Barakat points out that there are different factors present in
Arab and Muslim culture that can motivate the wide use of Arabic proverbs;
he states that:

the emphasis Arabs place on learning wisdom, not necessarily

derived from institutional knowledge, and the respect Moslems [sic]
have for the Hadith2 of the Prophet Mohamed and the Sunna 3
associated with him (1980:8).

2
Hadith is a traditional account of things said or done by prophet Mohamed.
3
The Sunna is the traditional portion of Muslim law, based on the words and acts of prophet Mohamed.
Quran and the Hadith are regarded by Arabs as a major part of their tradition
and it is so ordinary to hear old people in Arabic countries mixing the
Prophetic sayings and Arabic proverbs. The mixture of prophetic words and
proverbs is special form of respect and love for Arab proverbs. (Ahmed,
2005: 17).

2.3.5 Contrastive Perspective on Proverb Study

Although proverbs are different across languages and cultures, many

cross-lingual and cross-cultural similarities can still be found. These
similarities are motivated by the fact that proverbs are produced and used by
human beings who share a lot of cognitive, psychological and emotional
characteristics. Cross-lingual and cross-cultural proverbial differences are
particularly associated with the peculiar or exotic animals, plants, weather,
terms of kinship, social activities or traditional foods. According to many
studies, such variations occur when proverbs are formed in the different
places and certain geographical, social and cultural circumstances. Linguists,
folklorists and literary scholars try to discover why proverbs can be very
different and also very similar (Petrova, 2013 cited in Borowska, 2014:
305).

Scholars interested in investigating proverbs from a contrastive

perspective need to be familiar with linguistic, functional stylistic sameness
of two languages in which the proverbs are produced. This is because any
lack of linguistic, functional or stylistic knowledge would make it difficult
to correctly match the two sets of proverbs produced in the different
languages. Then, it is imperative to realize that the contrastive perspective to
the study of proverbs comes from the functional need and desire for
improving methodology to become more reasonable, scientific, accurate in
order to show similarity and difference in the grammatical structure and
pragma-stylistic functions of proverbs in different languages. More recently,
the use of the concept of “proverb meaning (sense), proverb synonyms,
semantic equivalence, semantic variation, semantic analogy, etc.” has
proven useful (Borowska, 2014: 310).

One of the recent significant achievements of this recent trend is to be

seen in Matti Kuusi International Type System of Proverbs, edited by Outi
Lauhakangas. This volume includes a big database in which many proverbs
from different languages are arranged, collected and categorized based on
semantic rules. This database enables the discovery of the semantic
equivalence of two proverbs, if they are from different languages, as in the
following examples:

(1) “English: Blood is thicker than water.

(2) German: Blut ist dicker als Wasser” (Borowska, 2014: 310).

In such cases, the writer evaluates and contrasts only the specific wording of
one direct or overt meaning and syntactic structure of proverbs sentence.
Nevertheless, according to researchers most proverbs contain figure of
speech that make them less clear, implicit, and have metaphorical meanings.
Examples of figurative proverbs across English and Arabic cultures are love
is blind, ,‫ الحب اعمى‬as both proverbs use personification to indicate that the
lover cannot see the faults in the person whom s/he loves. Semantic
equivalence shows the similarity that very significantly differs from the
much more obvious type of lexical equivalence of two or more words, or
strings of words, in different languages, which have the same denotational,
or dictionary meanings (Petrova, 2013 cited in Borowska, 2014: 310).

The folklorist Alan Dundes argues that we should search for

equivalence in proverbs that use various images while conveying the same
message, e.g., “He who is bitten by a snake fears even a rope” (English), “A
scalded cat fears even cold water” (French). The common thought embodied
in these examples can be formulated like this: “a painful experience makes a
person overly prudent and cautious” ( Borowska, 2014: 319). Paremiologists
have reached to different terms to refer to the basic thought, or concept that
is embodied in one or a group of proverb equivalents in the same language,
or in different languages. Petrova (2013 cited in Borowska , 2014: 319)
states that some of them from the terms “thought, basic idea, denotational
(direct, literal) meaning, figurative meaning, the sense” of a proverb, etc.,
and others are used in order to contrast and compare the semantic content of
proverbs. But some of these terms overlap with each other and others
contain various or identical meanings. The examples of typical proverb
explanations “Once something has been done, it cannot be changed, no
matter how much you regret having done it” for the literal proverb “What’s
done can’t be undone”, and “Do not support any members of your family or
household who cannot earn their keep” for the figurative proverb “Keep no
more cats than will catch mice.” such examples prove that a dictionary
explanation of a proverb doesn’t vary from its meaning, sense, or definition
(ibid.).

Another unit for studying proverb semantics is the logeme which is

suggested by the Russian scholars (P. V. Chesnokova, L. V. Savenkova, and
D. Y. Polinichenko). Logeme is suggested not only to specify the sense of a
single proverb text, but also to summarize the essential meaning of a group
of similar proverbs that are thematically close. In this example, “Actions
speak louder than words, “An ounce of practice is worth a pound of
precept”; “Example is better than precept”, “Deeds will show themselves”,
and “words will pass away” are included in the single logeme, which is
(Speaking is less efficient than doing) (Polinichenko, 2004: 85-86). This
term might be used more successfully to conduct cross-cultural studies, in
which proverbs are described and analyzed in various languages (Petrova,
2013: 320).