Domestic animals in English and Iraqi rural proverbs : a pragmastylistic study

الملخص EN

Proverbs gain their importance not only from the fact that they represent a cultural record of the people of every nation, but they reveal the way they use language and how they exploit their environments as a good source of inspiration to enrich that language.

Domestic animals, as part of every environment, play a major role in composing proverbs in every nation.

This study is an attempt to pragmastylistically analyse some selected English and Iraqi rural proverbs using domestic animals in their texts.

It limits itself to investigate certain stylistic and pragmatic devices such as: the type of sentences, their lengths, their content and grammatical words, the part of speech used, metaphor, repetition, the kinds of illocutionary forces, the types of the speech acts and the anaphoric references.

This study draws some conclusions from which are the following: -that the gap in culture does not affect the use of similar proverbs semantically and pragmatically, - the English sentence is longer than the Arabic sentence, and - the two types of proverbs use the same illocutionary forces.