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Article published In: Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 15:6 (2024) ► pp.929–951

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Representation of women in English and Persian proverbs

A Cultural-Linguistic perspective

ORCiD logo with link | Gonbad Kavous UniversityGonbad-e-Kavous
ORCiD logo with link | Fujian Normal UniversityFuzhou
Published online: 1 December 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.21019.dab
Abstract
The present study aims to investigate the portrayal of women in English and Persian proverbs using the multidisciplinary field of Cultural Linguistics as an alternative to critical discourse analysis. Utilizing a corpus analysis approach for Cultural Linguistics (Jensen, Kim E. 2017. “Corpora and Cultural Cognition: How Corpus-Linguistic Methodology Can Contribute to Cultural Linguistics.” In Advances in Cultural Linguistics, ed. by Farzad Sharifian, 477–506. Singapore: Springer Nature. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), 124 English and 186 Persian proverbs representing the theme of ‘woman’ were compared and contrasted cross-culturally. Results of grounded-theory driven analysis revealed: (a) while various cultural schemata and cultural metaphors reflecting both dark and bright sides of women in proverbs were unveiled, only one cultural category in Persian proverbs with no similar instance in English proverbs was revealed; and (b) in some English and Persian proverbs, interpreting cultural schemas predicates upon eliciting and understanding the cultural metaphors hidden in the proverbs. The results are discussed with reference to the potentiality of Cultural Linguistics as an analytical framework for paremiology that can provide an in-depth interpretation of proverbs as a culturally-loaded discourse.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Proverbs and their nature
    • 2.2Representation of women in proverbs
      • 2.2.1Women in proverbs: Comparative paremiology
      • 2.2.2Women in proverbs: Descriptive paremiology
    • 2.3Cultural Linguistics
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Corpus
    • 3.2Analytical framework
    • 3.3Procedure
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Cultural schema of woman in English and Persian proverbs
    • 4.2Cultural metaphors of woman in English and Persian proverbs
    • 4.3Cultural categories of woman in English and Persian proverbs
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
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