Woman in Persian Proverbs and Idioms: A Corpus-based Study of Cohesion from the Viewpoint of Discourse Analysis

This research aims to study cohesion & coherence and the type of discourse in proverbs and idioms regarding women. The theoretical framework of the analysis is Halliday-Matthiessen’s functional approach, focusing on the textual meta-function. The selected corpus is all proverbs and idioms in Koucheh dictionary. The method consists of both qualitative elements and quantitative approach. The qualitative elements are based on cohesive discourse analysis and the quantitative approach is the statistical analysis of the corpus based on Pearson correlation test. The results show that: (1) Both grammatical and lexical cohesive devices are used in Kouche but the distribution of devices is different. (2) There are no cohesive devices in %17.93 of Koucheh, in which, cohesion is functional and related to coherence. (3) The correlation between the number of cohesive devices and the words is significant and the discourse in this dictionary is mostly coherent, called “minimal discourse”.