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1. Introduction

1.1 Significance of the Study
Proverbs are the accumulation and crystallization of long-time human experienceand wisdom. They are passed down from generation to generation. Proverbs are easy toremember but contain profound wisdom and philosophy. Proverbs make a difference inlanguage, just as Mieder said that even debated in the United Nations, proverbs wereoften interspersed. Since proverbs could become verbal weapons that were difficult toargue against. In such debates the proverbs took on serious meanings and were used byintelligent people to strengthen their arguments with strong emotions and spice oftraditional wisdom (1993). Therefore, the status of proverbs cannot be ignored.Compared with studies on the base forms of proverbs which have made greatachievements at home and abroad, studies on proverb variations are far from enough.For English proverbs, much past work on proverbs often focused attention on the formor function or a comparative translation with Chinese proverbs. As for proverbvariations, classification of different ways in translation was initiated by researchers.Little attention among studies has paid on the corpus-based investigation on the proverbvariations. This paper tries to make a study on proverb variations in use based on corpusfrom the cognitive perspective.If language users want to speak English fluently like natives, they should concernabout proverbs since proverbs are crucial in many aspects. Native speakers are good atusing formulaic expressions. In this sense, proverbs reflect the speakers’ linguisticcompetence of a foreign language to the extent that they can master precise idiomaticusage. With time going on, variant proverbs are getting popular in daily life. Variantproverbs, also called proverb variations, stem from the original form. Sometimes theyare not easy to recognize. Proverb variations are created to fit into specific contexts andso help achieve lexical cohesion. Over time proverbs have undergone some changes inform and grammar, while their main meaning still remains unchanged on the whole.
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1.2 Organization of the Paper
This paper consists of six chapters.Chapter one is the introduction, which provides some information about the topicand the current background and points out main contents of each chapter briefly.Chapter two gives a literature review. In this chapter, theories about Englishproverbs and language variety at home and abroad will be introduced. This chapter willlist main research achievements about proverbs from different perspectives, like fromcultural point of view, from lexical point of view and from syntactic point of view.Chapter three is to build up the theoretical framework for this study. The firstsection of this chapter will present a general introduction to the prototype theory,including its development and its opinion. Section two will describe its characteristics.Section three will focus on some characteristics of prototype theory which are closelyrelated to the study, providing the interpretation for English proverbs and variations. Inaddition, definitions of proverbs and proverb variations and advantages of using corpusare given in this part. Chapter four presents the procedure of the research including the researchquestions, research subjects, data collection and data processing.Chapter five is the major part of the study. It giv本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。