A Semantic Analysis of Animal Names in Lāri Proverbs

Stories, anecdotes, lullabies and proverbs are part of the oral literature reflecting the purest, deepest and the most elegant feelings as well as Iranian Languages and Dialects 2 9 Summary of Articles thoughts, ideas and realities of a society. Due to this, oral literature is supposed to be a rich and reliable source in the study of culture, tendencies,capabilities and faculties of a society. Proverbs are simple in structure but deep in meaning. They are brief representations of a full event or a complete story. Another characteristic is the use of usual and frequent words such as animal names, plants, fruits, body part terms and also colours in their connotational and metaphoric meanings for the purpose of emphasizing a positive or a negative semantic feature, shared with human beings. The aim of the present paper is to study the function of animal names in Lāri proverbs relying on “signification”, “subjectivity” and “social function”. After extracting 110 proverbs out of a collection of 435 items containing one or more animal names, they were analyzed based on the above criteria. The results show that the dominant subjects in the use of animal terms in the proverbs are ethical and didactic ones. Their functions are mostly educational and their signification, unlike the real world, is of semireferentialtype. In addition, the results compared with a similar study on Kermāni dialect showed significant similarities.