Proverbs

[Eve Sweetser]

Karen Sullivan and I have a paper about the metaphoric and metonymic 
relationships in proverbs which I think applies quite well to these cases:

2009. Karen Sullivan and Eve Sweetser.  2009. Is "Generic is Specific" a 
Metaphor?" in Fey Parrill, Vera Tobin and Mark Turner (eds.), /Meaning, 
Form and Body/.  (Selected papers from the 2008 CSDL meeting).  Stanford 
CA: CSLI Publications.



On 11/13/12 6:45 PM, Angus Grieve-Smith wrote:
> On 11/13/2012 12:51 PM, Riddle, Elizabeth wrote:
>> Following up the points about story telling, I'm thinking of times 
>> when English speakers say things like "Remember the boy who cried 
>> 'wolf'" as an admonishment to a child.  This utterance is not a 
>> proverb in and of itself, has normal sentence structure, and is not 
>> really metaphorical in the sense that saying "that's sour grapes" 
>> might be, but seems to serve a similar communicative purpose to that 
>> of a proverb in such a situation.  I'm wondering if such references 
>> regularly occur in the discourse of various native North American 
>> languages.
>
>     It's not just explicit allusions like that, but implicit 
> quotations like "Once more into the breach, my friends!" or in French, 
> "revenons à ces moutons..."
>
>     At this point I have to mention the Star Trek episode "Darmok," 
> which imagined a culture that communicated entirely in those kinds of 
> allusions to old stories:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok
>
>     The "Universal Translator" technology was unable to cope with it, 
> passing the allusions on literally without supplying either the 
> stories themselves or any interpretation as to their relevance.
>