Introducing Cultural Linguistics as an Investigative Framework to Analyze Proverbs

As collections of thoughts and ideas, proverbs are stated in short figurative phrases and sentences. The last twenty years have witnessed an increasing interest in studies on proverbs from various perspectives including the description, comprehension, and comparison of L1-L2 proverbs most of which have centered on structural, lexical and verbal processes analysis in the total negligence of any cultural focus. To bridge this gap, this paper aims to present Cultural Linguistics as an investigative framework to unveil the cultural elements in proverbs. To do so, first the previous linguistic models and tools to study proverbs are presented and examined thoroughly to highlight lack of a culturally-oriented linguistic analysis in paremiology. Then, Cultural Linguistics is introduced as a framework to reveal the cultural content of proverbs using the three elements of cultural schema, cultural category and cultural metaphor, collectively known as cultural conceptualization Sharifian, 2015. To substantiate the issue, proverbs from different languages are analyzed using the framework. It is argued that such analysis can assist paremiologists to deepen their understanding of proverbs especially when comparing proverbs of different languages with distinct cultural backgrounds.