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Proverbs within Cognitive Linguistics: State of the art
Edited by Sadia Belkhir
[Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts 16] 2024
► pp. 132–171

Chapter 6
Cognitive Linguistics and expressing/interpreting proverbs in a second language

| University of Ghana, Legon

This chapter relies on Cognitive/Cultural Linguistics assumptions to investigate proverb interpretation and expression among Akan-English bilinguals in Ghana. Cognitive linguistic approaches to studying proverbs, e.g., Lakoff and Turner (1989), emphasise the role cognitive models play in human conceptualisation, including proverb interpretation. Using fifty common proverbs in each of their two languages, participants were asked to interpret proverbs in one language and provide their conceptual equivalents in the other language. Findings suggest that while the bilinguals were better able to interpret proverbs whose interpretation needed less cultural competence in both languages, they appeared to rely on L1 cultural models to express/interpret L2 proverbs whose interpretation needed more cultural competence.

Keywords: Akan, English, L2, metaphors, proverbs
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cognitive/Cultural Linguistics and proverb
  • 3.Methods
  • 4.Discussion of results
    • 4.1Proverb response distribution
    • 4.2Processing metaphoric and non-metaphoric proverbs
    • 4.3Identifying cognitive models for interpreting metaphoric proverbs
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 30 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clscc.16.06ans
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