Exploring Cognitive, Situational and Cultural Dimensions of Delvari Figurative Proverbs through Anderson’s Extended Cognitive Proverb Model

Anderson (2013) believes that Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 1998, 2002) is potentially capable of analyzing proverbs by incorporation of two blending processes to account for the cultural, cognitive and contextual aspects of their meaning. This article aims at applying Anderson’s (2013) Cognitive Proverb Model on six figurative proverbs of Delvari Dialect in an attempt to shed light on cognitive processes involved in their meaning construction. These proverbs were selected by a self-selection process. The rationale behind this process was to have a more coherent discussion and to focus only on one type of proverbs. The findings show that the wisdom meaning is the product of conceptual blending of animal and human affairs in two input spaces organized by a general space. The general space contains the commonalities between the input spaces. All these spaces are projected onto the blended space and create an integrated meaning package called base meaning or the “wisdom”. Base meaning integrates with the referential meaning and constructs situational meaning. Proverb use is actually an action like praise, advice, etc. This research shows that ecological and cultural features are in input space 1, without which construction of base meaning, situational and performance meanings looks impossible. HUMAN AS ANIMAL metaphor instigates mapping of input space 1 properties onto input space 2. This model clearly shows the role of cognition, culture and situation in the construction of proverb meaning and confirms the applicability of a cognitive model in explaining semantic and pragmatic complexities of language.