Semantic Study Of English Proverbs

Proverb is the cream of a language and human wisdom crystallization. It is a kind of idiom, and it is a popular speech form among the people. The language of the proverbs is concise and full of meanings. Most of the proverbs reflect the labouring people's living practical experiences. Popular proverbs are the proverbs that they have been transmitted through oral tradition. Proverbs play a guilding role in their lives.A brief introduction is given to make clear the purpose and significance of the present thesis firstly. Then the thesis illustrates domestic studies of proverbs and their relevant studies abroad as well. These studies mainly center on the researches on the aspects of culture, vocabulary, syntactic features and semantic features. But the comprehensive study of syntactic research, semantic research on proverbs is seldom. So, this thesis tries to reveal the semantic connotation of English proverbs from the angle of integrated sentence structures and language meanings by semantic study.As two branches of linguistics, syntax can convey proverbs' formal meanings, while semantic meaning composes proverbs' contents. They are united together in the use of the proverbs at last. This thesis analyses different characteristics of English proverbs through four kinds of simple sentences and four kinds of complex sentences on the aspects of syntax and semantics. From these syntactic structures we can see that the meaning of the English proverbs is expressed by a relatively stable performance of syntactic structure, and some specific syntactic structures also highlight the contents of a specific scenario. Simple sentences of English proverbs in semantic structure are nearly the same with semantic structure of the sentences. Complex sentences of English proverbs are different from sentence structures obviously. This thesis also illustrates the semantic attribution of English proverbs.The analysis and descriptions above will be good for the English teaching, and these may provide some new methods to the machine translation.