A corpus-based empirical analysis of pragmatics of English proverbs with graduonymy

Abstract

Nowadays, pragmatic features of proverbs are of great interest to linguists as proverbs are often used in conversations to polish speech stylistically, semantically and, at the same time, pragmatically. Paradigms such as synonymy, antonymy and polysemy were investigated as lexical-semantic relations in proverbial content in recent works. This research is devoted to analysing another lexical-semantic relation in proverbial content: graduonymic relations and their types, which are frequently seen in proverbial content, and their role in the pragmatic peculiarities of proverbs in particular contexts. The empiric corpus-based analysis of proverbs containing graduonyms in the chosen text fragments that were created by native speakers of the English language served to disclose the pragmatics of proverbs such as graduonyms function as various types of deixis, emphasise the speech act steps of the proverb and increase the pragmatic potential of the proverb. The results of the paper are discussed in the context of theoretical and pragmatic perspectives.

Keywords: Deixis, graduonymy, pragmatics, proverb, speech act;