Proverbs

[Victor Golla]

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 9:31 PM, Bernd Heine <heine39 at gmail.com> wrote:

>                                             Why should proverbs not have a place in a
> (comprehensive) reference grammar? After all, they appear to occur in all
> languages that have been appropriately documented, and they are part of the
> knowledge speakers have about their language.

Proverbs are far from universal.  They are notably rare in North American
Indian languages, where riddles, too, are virtually unattested, except for a
few post-contact borrowings from English or French.

I don't think that the absence of these genres across an entire continent can
be written off as due to the lack of appropriate documentation.  Rather, it's
a matter of  metaphorical speech in general being little used in aboriginal
North American cultures for reasons that are ultimately historical and
distributional.

I'm not sure what this says about speakers' knowledge of their languages
in North America, but it at least suggests that certain elements of cognitive
style can co-vary with differences in discourse=level patterns of encoding.
This is apparently what Whorf meant when he wrote in "The Relation of
Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language" (in Carroll, ed., Language,
Thought and Reality, p. 146) that Hopi does not have metaphor "built into it"
in the same way that European languages do.

--Victor Golla