基于语料库的英语谚语变体研究外国语言学与应用语言学专业论文.docxVIP

M.A. M.A. Dissertation of Chongqing University ABSTRACT PAGE PAGE IV ABSTRACT As the crystallization of peoples wisdom, proverbs reflect and mirror cultures in the most effective way. They are considered as an indispensable part of English language. Although fixedness is one of their most important features, variation of English proverbs is widespread. More specifically, English proverb as the conventionalized form, one of its important features is no changes in use. Any of its components cannot be replaced, added or deleted. According to Moon (1998), the most salient features of proverbs are: institutionalization, lexicogrammatical fixedness and semantic non-compositionality. Therefore, with respect to the form of proverbs, they are usually fixed or frozen, which means, they allow no changes. However, there are a number of proverbs in English language that can be changed by language users through various modifications or transformations (such as substitution, deletion, addition, antonym and reversion), which are defined as ‘proverb variations’ in this thesis. Through these, people can achieve the effects of rendering the atmosphere, expressing emotions, highlighting a certain concept or witty humor. The main target of this thesis is to explore the phenomenon of English proverb variations with the help of the Corpus of Contemporary American English. On the one hand, with regard to the types of English proverb variations, we will discuss the following: substitutions, additions, deletions, antonyms and reversions. Through searching the frequency of the proverb citation form and the variant form in COCA, we find that substitutions, deletions and additions are the main variation types. In addition, by comparing the frequency of citation forms with that of variant forms, 90% of the citation form of English proverbs have variant forms. The phenomenon of English proverb variations is becoming understandable and widely accepted by language users who are likely to use pr