英语论文网

1 Literature Review

1.1 Concept of a proverb
In this part many topics will be taken into account. It is a general overview aboutthe proverbs, their definitions, the origin of the English proverbs, their characteristics,importance, and differences with the idioms and sayings. It is inappropriate here to choose a general or one definition of a proverb becausea proverb is multifunctional. It has been defined from different perspectives by differentscholars and dictionaries and according to different functions.Norrick (1985:78) defines proverbs as “a traditional, conversational, didacticgenre with general meaning, a potential free conversational turn, preferably withfigurative meaning.”Mieder (2004:3) defines a proverb as “A proverb is a short, generally knownsentence of the folk which contains wisdom, truth, morals, and traditional views in ametaphorical, fixed and memorizable form which is handed down from generation togeneration.”Later Mieder (2004:1) defined a proverb as “Proverbs are a significant rhetoricalforce in various modes of communication, from friendly chats, powerful politicalspeeches, and religious sermons to lyrical poetry, best-seller novels, and the influentialmass media.”
………

1.2 Studies on English proverbs from different perspectives
Proverbs are an aspect of language. They have been studied and explored fromdifferent perspectives. Proverbs are one of the folklorist studies; therefore, most whohave studied proverbs are folkloristics. This part deals with the past studies of Englishproverbs; it is divided into different subparts according to the kind of study. Dundes was one of the famous giants of the international folkloristics; he wasinterested in folklore in general and with proverbs in particular. His lectures, whichhave been delivered around the world, have gained the interest of many scholars andstudents of the folklore. Also, he has taught over twenty thousand students with aninterest in folklore at the University of California at Berkeley. Dundes was interested inthe definition of genres by means of structural, textual, and contextual analysis. Thetextual features of proverbs are rhyme and alliteration, stress, pitch, juncture, tone andonomatopoeia. The text is a version or a single telling of a tale. The text is considered tobe independent of its texture for the purpose of analysis, while texture is untranslatable.For example the proverb “coffee boiled is coffee spoiled” may be translated into manylanguages, but translation of the texture feature of rhyme will virtually be nil. Thecontext of the proverb is the specific social situation in which that proverb is employed.Again Dundes employed proverbs to illustrate the theoretical point for folklore ingeneral in his article Structuralism and Folklore (1976), his idea was that the proverbconsists of at least elements that are made up of a topic and a comment to be a perfectexample of a minimal structural unit (Mieder, 2007).
……………

2 Methodology

2.1 Research questions
This study is an attempt to analyse English proverbs from the perspective ofcooperative principle. The study aims to answer the following three questions:1. Do the English proverbs found in Charles Dickens’ novels demonstrate theobservance or non-observance of Grice’s maxims?2. Which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。