Snowclones and Proverbs in a Cognitive-Linguistic Perspective
Activity: Talk or presentation types › Lecture and oral contribution
Kim Ebensgaard Jensen - Other
Snowclones (schematic stock phrases) have a bad reputation among linguists and professional writers alike and are seen as tokens of lazy writing. However, there is more to snowclones than just that. Some snowclones – which we call proverbial snowclones – display degree of proverbiality to the extent that it can be argued that they occupy a grey zone between proverbs proper and semi-schematic idioms. Moreover, they are often intertwined with (pop) cultural literacy and seem to serve a number of social and communicative functions. Drawing on theoretical insights from construction grammar and cognitive-semantic approaches to socio-cultural cognition, this presentation reports on three simple corpus-based analyses of proverbial snowclones within the English language – namely, the only good X is a dead X, one does not simply X into Y, and in X no one can hear you Y. More specifically, this presentation addresses features of their usage patterns, such as productivity, epistemic status marking, and co-occurrence with co-textual topics, so as to address their potential proverbial nature
16 Nov 2022
Event (Seminar)
Title | Norm, Variation, Language Change 2022 |
---|---|
Date | 16/11/2022 → … |
Location | University of Copenhagen |
City | Copenhagen |
Country/Territory | Denmark |
- construction grammar, proverbs, snowclones, corpus linguistics, cultural literacy, hate speech, cognitive linguistics
Research areas
Related Research outputs (1)
- E-pub ahead of print
The only good snowclone is a dead snowclone: A cognitive-linguistic exploration of the frayed ends of proverbiality
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Book chapter › Research › peer-review
ID: 325714731