Speech acts in some Kurdish proverbs and sayings

Abstract EN

Utterances of proverbs have pragmatic functions, they are not just sequences of words but they are used in real communicative situations as speech acts.

Proverbs are doubly indirect: first, they are quoted as such they express observations not original or novel; the speaker need not take the responsibility for their form or content.

Second, proverbs generate implicatures, the speaker utters the proverb literally but means something else in context.

Knowing and using proverbs are important but their functions are even more important.

You have to know what speech act is conveyed by a particular proverb.

In this paper, an attempt is made to analyze seven Kurdish proverbs to find out what speech acts they convey.