THE LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF AFRICAN PROVERBS
Keywords:
Key words: African proverbs, literature, semantic richness, linguistic, oral literature, language, cultural identity, communication.Abstract
The linguistic features of African proverbs are examined in this study, with particular attention paid to their pragmatic uses in cultural and communicative contexts, syntactic structures, and semantic richness. As a type of oral literature, proverbs are essential for maintaining cultural identity, passing down knowledge, and promoting social cohesiveness among African communities. Using a qualitative methodology, the study examines a wide range of proverbs from different African languages. Key findings include a reliance on metaphor and symbolism to convey meaning, recurrent syntactic patterns like parallelism and ellipsis, and their practical application in community engagement, moral instruction, and conflict resolution. The importance of proverbs as linguistic artifacts and cultural instruments is highlighted by this analysis, which also shows how applicable they are to comprehending African communication patterns and worldviews.
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