Proverbs are frequently and purposefully used in discourse and conversation. Consider the following passage from Substitute me, by Lori Tharps:

(1) The clock read 7:59 A.M. when Kate strode into work. As she passed by Danyel Green’s empty office, she sighed with relief. “The early bird catches the worm,” she said to herself. For the last few weeks, Kate had been forcing herself to get to work by eight A.M.

Because proverbs share the discourse function of abstracting the content of the preceding context with “shell-nouns” like fact (Schmid 2000), I propose that they are proforms with fixed values to replace evaluative utterances. Instead of making different evaluative utterances for each situation, speakers can repeatedly apply proverbs to different situations to make hearers infer that ‘it is good, as in (1), or bad to do such and such’ in a generalized way (Kövecses 2010).

As proforms like pronouns, they must be fixed in form and generalized in content. Also like pronouns, they do not introduce any referents in discourse by themselves. Just as pronouns represent salient discourse referents in the common ground of the speech participants (Lambrecht 1994, Clark 1996, Roberts 2003), proverbs represent situations involving such referents. As clausal proforms, proverbs consist of the subject expressing a topic and the predicate expressing evaluation, which helps invite the inference that the discourse referents are comparable in value to proverb topics, and the evaluation given to the latter is also given to the former. In (1), the proverb gives a positive value to the early bird, and similarly to Kate in her evaluation of herself.

Such evaluations of discourse referents through proverbs are hard to obtain with the Conversational Maxims or Relevance Theory (Grice 1975, Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995). Thanks to their literal meanings, it is unclear whether proverbs are based on adequate evidence or provides required information, or what relevance they have to the current context. Unlike incomplete utterances, it is impossible to turn proverbs into maximally informative or relevant utterances by adding other information to them inferentially.

The pragmatic principles mentioned above are designed to constrain and account for how individual utterances are used in context. Proverbs, by contrast, are proforms of individual evaluative utterances, and so can circumvent them. It might be argued that proverbs follow Horn’s 1989 R principle “say no more than you must” in that they express the minimum amount of information which hearers have to extend to derive inferences. But the inferences are made to increase information, not on the proverbs themselves, but on salient discourse referents in their vicinity. This means that R principle holds good for individual utterances to be produced about discourse referents represented by proverbs, and that it does not control proverbs; rather they are a medium through which it works on individual utterances. Besides, proverbs are not idioms because they can be translated into, or find exact equivalents in, other languages with similar effects (Levinson 1983), suggesting that their proform-status is cross-linguistically valid.

 

References

Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Syntax and semantics, Vol. 3: Speech acts, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 41-58. New York: Academic Press.

Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kövecses, Zoltán. 2002/2010. Metaphor: a practical introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information structure and sentence form: topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roberts, Craige. 2003. Uniqueness in definite noun phrases. Linguistics and Philosophy 26, 287-350.

Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2000. English abstract nouns as conceptual shells: from corpus to cognition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 1986/1995. Relevance: communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.