Study Of The Linguistic And Cultural Characteristics Of Korean Proverbs

The so-called common saying is a phrase form that combines the characteristics of national language and cultural features formed in the long history.Korean people created countless common sayings full of wisdom and national characteristics long time ago,and applied them to daily communication.Korean common sayings not only reflect structural characteristics of Korean language,but also contain rich customs,culture and ideology of Korean people.Therefore,to fully understand Korean common sayings,it is necessary to explore the essence of Korean common sayings and analyze characteristics of those common sayings from the perspectives of language and culture.In this thesis,linguistics and cultural studies are adopted to analyze words and syntactic skills used in Korean common sayings,and deeply explores how Korean common sayings reflect inherent life styles,customs,thoughts and feelings of Korean people and lessons,experience and truth that Korean people obtain in daily life as well as objects and phenomena that Korean people affirm,praise or criticize and mock at.This thesis is composed of five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction,which mainly elaborates on previous researches on the names,definitions and linguistic and cultural characteristics of Korean common sayings,points out the achievements and existing problems and expounds research methods and structure of this thesis.The second chapter analyzes the linguistic essence and characteristics of common sayings,clarifies the differences between common sayings and idioms and reclassifies common sayings.In essence,common saying is a fixed phrase form through which Korean people vividly popularize their experience,lessons,social inclinations and opinions gained in the long history.There are both similarities and differences between common sayings and idioms.In this chapter,the differences between common sayings and idioms are dissected based on formation of vocabulary.Korean common sayings are rich in content and diverse in form.This chapter mainly divides common sayings into three types by means of their content and expression form,which are respectively maxims and slangs,inherent sayings and Chinese sayings,and positive sayings and negative sayings.The linguistic and cultural characteristics of common sayings are discussed from three aspects.Firstly,linguistic and cultural characteristics of common sayings are embodied in different life customs reflected in common sayings,official titles,place names and agricultural products' names that have been preserved through common sayings since ancient times and anecdotes and historical stories that were spread among Korean people and formed common sayings long time ago.Secondly,the linguistic and cultural characteristics are reflected in event themes in common sayings,implicit colloquial expressions of things,characters,opportunities and environments contained in common sayings and ballads,nursery rhymes and legends reflected in some common sayings.Thirdly,the linguistic and cultural characteristics of common sayings are verified through national psychology,national habits,national history and natural geographical environment contained in common sayings.In the third chapter,linguistic characteristics of common sayings are analyzed,among which,lexical features of Korean common sayings are analyzed mainly from the diversity and richness of vocabulary.Semantic features of Korean common sayings are expounded through various semantic structures of Korean common sayings based on its polysemy,synonymy and antonymy.And syntactic features of Korean common sayings are narrated according to lexical combination structure and sentence structure.With regard to sentence structure,characteristics of various sentence structures such as present,past and future tenses,declarative,interrogative and imperative are expounded.In terms of the phonetic features of Korean common sayings,rhyming categories of syllable structure are emphatically analyzed.The fourth chapter discusses the linguistic and cultural content and use methods of Korean common sayings.The linguistic and cultural contents of common sayings do not refer to the lexical meanings of their constituents,but refers to the contents to be conveyed by common sayings which are different from the culture of other national languages and unique linguistic and cultural contents of the Korean nation.The expression forms of linguistic and cultural contents of Korean common sayings are divided into figurative expression form,direct expression form and conceptual expression form.Though the main form of common sayings is figurative expression form,there are also direct form and conceptual form in real life.In particular,common sayings in conceptual expression form do not rely on scientific analysis and summative definition,but on predictions and judgments that people get from life experience,which is different from academic concepts.The content classification of Korean common sayings mainly depends on people's judgements and evaluations of other things,including affirmation,praise,negation and censure,etc.In the meantime,the use principles and specific use methods of common sayings are introduced based on the functions of common sayings.The fifth chapter is the conclusion,which is a summary of the whole thesis and points out the achievements and problems in the research.