A cognitive-pragmatic account of Mosuli Arabic proverbs with special reference to English

الملخص EN

Proverbs form an important part of any language and culture.

They have been studied from various perspectives, but few scholars focus on their cognitive or pragmatic dimensions.

The present study aims to analyse Mosuli Arabic proverbs from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective.

In this sense, it attempts, first, to explore the mental processes that help in understanding a proverb in a possible context, and, second to identify the pragmatic functions realized in the illocutionary acts, the accompanying prelocutionary effects performed in the selected proverbs.

The data analysis consists of ten proverbs that have been selected randomly from Mosuli Arabic native speakers.

In this respect, every single proverb has been checked out in authentic published books about Mosuli proverbs, so as to ensure that they are authentic.

The data samples are divided into categories and analysed in a qualitative method.

It is hypothesized that mapping is the mental process that is used in interpreting proverbs and Mosuli Arabic proverbs are mostly directive illocutionary acts.

The study used a revised model for the data analysis that covers two perspectives of proverbs, namely: cognition and pragmatics.

This model is based on some theories that are taken from, first, Lakoff and Turner (1989)'s, the Great Chain Metaphor theory that helps in exploring the cognitive mechanisms in the selected samples, second, Searle (1979)'s classification of illocutionary speech acts that are used to analyse the pragmatic functions of the selected proverbs.

This study concludes that mapping across conceptual domains is the mental process in interpreting proverbs and that Mosuli Arabic proverbs can perform different kinds of speech acts.