Snowclones and Proverbs in a Cognitive-Linguistic Perspective

With Kim Ebensgaard Jensen.

Abstract

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

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