https://doi.org/10.31261/NEO.2024.36.09
This article aims to highlight the fact that languages reflect different representations of the world and that linguistic diversity leads to a diversity of visions, thus enabling comparisons to be made between their common and distinctive features. It focuses on the French and Chinese languages, with some Spanish illustrations, using proverbs as a case study of this duality between universal wisdom and local particularity. Paremiologists often identify metaphor as a key criterion for this form of expression. While metaphor is traditionally and, in most cases, studied as a figure of speech, it also constitutes an expression of worldview, integrating both intellectual and spiritual aspects as well as everyday experiences. The concept of conceptual metaphor, popularized in the 1980s, requires empirical systematicity to be relevant, thereby revealing socio-anthropological stereotypes. The hypothesis put forward in this article is that these conceptual metaphors, through their presence in a type of utterance with wide circulation – proverbs, can reveal both a specific way of thinking and a tool of argumentation to a particular community or of universal scope.
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Vol. 36 (2024)
Published: 2024-12-31
10.31261/NEO
Français (France)
English