International Journal of Language & Linguistics

A cognitive study of certain Animals in English and Arabic Proverbs: A Comparative Study
Imad Hayif Sameer

Abstract
Proverbs which are short and generally known sentences are handed down from generation to generation .They contain wisdom, truth, and traditional views in a metaphorical and memorable form .They are effective devices to communicate wisdom and knowledge about human nature .Their meaning cannot be understood independent of human cognition. The meaning must be surveyed in a way that human uses and understands easily .The present study compares and analyzes certain kinds of animal English proverbs with Arabic .These kinds are dogs and horses .This study is based on elected model gathering Lakoff and Turner (1989) and Sperber and Wilson (1986) approach as well as Hsieh's (2006) approach of semantic molecules to recognize the exact meaning of these proverbs and know their cultural background. This research aims to study the relevance theoretic notion of enrichment to be the procedure for deriving implicature /explicature from what is said .Two forms of this procedure are discussed .Grammatical motivation and conceptual motivation enrichment are tackled .This effect is insufficient to account for all cases but it cooperates with other cognitive mechanisms such as metaphoric and metonymic mappings .It also aims to apply cognitive linguistics on these proverbs and investigate the type of metaphors and metonymy manifested in them. For this purpose, 20 English and Arabic proverbs are collected; ten of each kind are analyzed in both languages .It is hypothesized that proverbs have the same function and underlay the same deep structure but different surface structure. They are cultural, social and cognitive values transmitted from one generation to another.

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