Global Journal of Human Social Science, C: Sociology and Culture, Volume 22 Issue 1

II. L iterature R eview The following review of literature presents some definitions of proverbs, explores the connection between animals and humans as manifested in proverbs, and sheds light on various animal proverb studies that have been conducted in several communities around the world. a) Definitions of Proverbs Proverbs are said to be the words of the wise which bear fruits of subtle wisdom. Many researchers have attempted to define proverbs over the last decades. For instance, Norrick (1985) identifies a proverb as “a traditional, conversational, didactic genre with general meaning, a potential free conversational turn, preferably with figurative meaning” (p. 78), and thus, he asserts the traditionality of proverbial expressions in general. Another attempt was made by Mieder (2004), in which he defines a proverb as “a short, sentence of the folk which contains wisdom, truth, moral values, and traditional views in a metaphorical, fixed and definite, and memorizable form which is handed from generations to generation” (p. 3). In simple terms, a proverb is a short saying common among the folk that is performed to express some truth. Proverbs can meticulously depict culturally ‐ specific accepted beliefs, ideas, attitudes and truths about how a particular speech community actually functions. Since a proverb is characterized as a “a saying current among the folk” (Taylor, 1931, p. 3), it carries a certain degree of wisdom on the basis of people’s stories, real-life situations and general experiences. Therefore, Gibbs (2001) affirms that proverbs can be described as “familiar, fixed, sentential expressions that express well-known truths, social norms, or moral themes” (p. 168). In other words, proverbs seem to establish a code of folk culture, and as a consequence, serve the purpose of successful interaction. b) Animals and Proverbs Animals play an important role in the lives of many people. Human beings and some animals can coexist and live together harmoniously which causes people to know some of the negative and positive characteristics of them well (Sameer, 2016). Since animals generally improve humans' lives, they seem to take part in the contexts of symbolic uses, such as in art, literature, religion, and mythology (Nesi, 1995). Strictly speaking, there appears to be an enormous body of words and expressions that pertain to animals in approximately all languages to describe the relationship that connects these animals to humans in various ways. Therefore, people resort to the use of animal words, expressions or metaphors when communicating with others to express their emotions, feelings, or depict some situation in various contexts (Budiarta & Kasni, 2017). Thus, one can make use of the performativity, i.e., the power of language to cause some change in the world, of such words and expressions in different communicative settings. Put differently, various types of texts, including proverbs, idioms, and literary genres can be manipulated to purposefully serve multiple communicative functions. By using animal proverbs, one can achieve many sociolinguistic purposes, such as describing, insulting, praising, and criticizing. Animal proverbs form an important constituent of the corpus of proverbial expressions in almost any language. In various societies, people frequently utilize such powerful proverbial animal sayings to ascribe specific characteristics of people to particular animals (Al-Harahsheh & Al-Rousan, 2020). Lakoff and Turner (1989) contend that animals can be personified by symbolically attributing several human characteristics to them. Kövecses (2010) agrees that “human behaviors can be metaphorically understood as animal behavior, especially when human behavior is violent, deviant or unreasonable” (p. 153). As a result, animal proverbs are used in their nonliteral sense to reveal certain figurative meanings that heavily rely on the connotations of these proverbial expressions which in turn make their use socially and culturally bound. Hence, the symbolic functions of animal proverbs necessitate a particular attention to their meaning in context and to the cultural perspective in general. Animal proverbs, which are of main concern here, could refer to the animal itself, part of its body, or to one of its traits in order to describe people or some of their good or bad behaviors. According to Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory , the process of mapping animal behaviors and traits onto human behavior and traits is built on the conceptual metaphor, NON-HUMAN IS HUMAN. As a result, such a practice is informed by the conceptual metaphor, PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS. People’s tendency to attribute other people’s behaviors and characteristics to animals seems to comply with traditions, cultural aspects, and social experience. c) Studies of Animal Proverbs Animal metaphors have been tremendously explored by many researchers around the world. For instance, Pourhossein (2016) attempted to investigate the degree of similarity between Persian and Turkish people on how they conceptualize the world by means of animal proverbs. The results revealed both similarity and variation in the way the participants conceptualized the world, depending on the cultural and environmental perspective of each speech community. Another study conducted by Riyanto (2018) attempted to emphasize the idea that human behavior can be understood in terms of animal behavior which is symbolically expressed in English proverbs. The findings showed that the animal constituents found in many English proverbs Volume XXII Issue I Version I 56 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 © 2022 Global Journals C Exploring Connotative Meanings and Metaphors of Saudi Animal Proverbs: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis