Research On Proverbs In Tongcheng

Proverb, known as the flower of wisdom, is the oral creation of the masses. It teaches people knowledge, experience and the life philosophy. Proverb is short but concensed in form,and it is rich in content with the vivid language. It is simple and pupular. And it is implied but meaningful.So it is beloved by the great masses. Proverb, kind of Chinese idoms, is grooup of rhymical words or a short phrase in structure. Serving as a word in grammar, proverb can act as a sentence element, which belongs to the lexicology. As a kind of unique language phenomenon, proverb is a mirror of social culture and carries deep and heavy cultural content.The Tongcheng city is the hometown of Tongcheng School with its beautiful moutains and great rivers. It is a gathering place of talents and has the literary prosperity and beautiful calligraphy since the ancient time. As the image of Tongcheng culture, Tongcheng Proverb is an encyclopedia of the dalily life of the public. It relates to the weather, farming, customs, production, social life and so forth. It is not only inclusive in content but also unique in sentence structure, language, culture, and content, therefore, worthy of special studies.In the sense of phonics, Tongcheng Proverb is clear in rhythm and forms a harmonious melody with the emloyment of rhyme, easy to memorize and spread. In the sense of words, Tongcheng Proverb has a good choice of words, e.g. combination of synonyms, juxtaposition of antonyms, clever use of overlapping sound words and employment of common dialect, so it is not only precise and appropriate, but also smart lively, full of flavors of life and local color. And as for the grammartical structure, it has two syntactic forms, simple sentence and complex sentence. Most proverbs take the form of the latter. The former is usually in the subject-verb pattern and seldom in the non-subject-verb pattern, reflecting the trend from oral to written language in the process of passing-down from generation to generation. Except for a few connected with the correlation method, the overwhelming majority of complex sentence proverbs rely on a combination of meaning, reflecting the distinctive colloquial feature of Tongcheng proverb. These two forms are mostly in the entire sentence structure and syllabicly symmetrical, and still some proverbs make structural change, which makes Tongcheng proverb both grave in written language and lively in the oral language. Tongcheng proverb uses lots of figures of speech, such as metaphor, personification, metonymy, hyperbole, antithesis, contrast, parallelism, top true, loop and so on. This makes the proverb not only expressive but also artistic apealing the knowledge it the proverb imparts. People will absorb kowledge and gain wisdom when enjoying the beauty of the proverb.Tongcheng proverb has a wide range of topics. Accoding to its content, it can be divided into five categories, the weather, farming, customs, society and daily life proverbs. Among these, the society, daily life and farming proverbs enjoy a large amounnt. This demonstrates that Tongcheng society is a typical moral social and agricultural one. Tong Cheng proverb reflects the colorful Tongcheng culture, generally the deeply-rooted Confucian culture and local farming culture in Tongcheng. For example, some proverbs stress education and morality, farming and business integrity, communication and interpersonal harmony and rituals and festivals, which can best embodies the unique spirite of Tongcheng people and reflects the positive side of Tongcheng culture. And also some proverbs contain the thoughts of preferring boys to girls, happy-go-lucky policy and looking down upon poverty and the old, which reflects the backward and fudal side in Tongcheng culture. When inheriting Tongcheng Proverb, we should discard its dross and absorb the essence. We should give full play to the positive role of Tongcheng Proverb in helping establish the correct moral concepts and values, remodel the spirit of the modern character of people and build a harmonious society.This paper, using the modern linguistics theory and method, makes a systematic of description and analysis the language features and cultural connotation of Tongcheng proverb.Before writing this paper, the writer has investigated the dialect area, made visits to the local customs experts and read many county annals and local cultural chronicles. A total of 1,683 pieces of Tongcheng proverbs has been collected. Therefore the materials are detailed, accurate and reliable, easy to analyze.In January,2010, Tong Cheng proverb is listed as the second batch of intangible cultural heritage of Tongcheng. Recently the Tongcheng Cultural Centre are undertaking to edit a book the Tongcheng Proverb. The witer hopes to do some humble help for the cultural construction of her hometown through this paper.