A Comext-Structure Analysis of Yoruba Proverbs in Discourse  

作　　者：Rahim Kajogbola Qmoloso 

机构地区：[1]AI-Hikmah University, llorin, Nigeria

出　　处：《US-China Foreign Language》2012年第7期1318-1329,共12页美中外语（英文版）

摘　　要：The study of meaning is a challenging aspect of linguistic analysis. Since understanding is the basis of linguistic communication, studying utterance meaning is very important in language study. Unfortunately, not all utterances can be successfully decoded through structural semantics alone, particularly proverbs, because of their peculiar nature, especially that of coding virtually all aspects of language users＇ world view. Contextual variables must be deployed with linguistic resources to use and decode proverbs. This fact informs the context-structure analysis adopted for the pragmatic study of YorOb~ proverbs in this work. The model posited that deploying and decoding proverbs called for their analysis in real discourse situations and required an understanding of their structure and their immediate and wider contexts, because they come from different sentences and are context-driven. Both the proverb and its context blend together in an interlocking manner, like the cob-web, such that we cannot isolate one from the other and still succeed in decoding the proverb. Also, proverbs are sub-sumed in the cultural and traditional beliefs of language users, which must be understood in order to understand the proverbs, as the beliefs form the background knowledge that language users draw upon to deploy and decipher them. We thus concluded that understanding the proverbs of a people can be a step towards understanding their culture and promoting inter-ethnic relationship and peace.

关 键 词：context-structure Yoruba ANALYSIS PROVERBS DISCOURSE 

分 类 号：TP391.12[自动化与计算机技术—计算机应用技术] O342[自动化与计算机技术—计算机科学与技术]