Opposition as a Basic Component in the Grammar of Proverbs Based on Persian and Chinese Proverbs

Proverbs is among the terms that researchers disagree on both defining and determining its examples, to the extent that some believe that it can never be defined. Due to these ambiguities, some have mixed it with other realms such as irony and allegorical metaphor. It seems that the researches in this field have not sought a systematic and well-founded framework for all kinds of parables. Researchers in linguistics and literature in the 20th century tried to extract general rules for both and present them under the title of "Grammar" considering the similarities of types and literary works, analyzing their structure, and defining different types in the form of a few simple forms. One of these forms is proverb the “grammar” of which can be obtained by analyzing its structure and extracting its components, and by putting them together. It seems that one of these basic components, which can be seen in different forms in proverbs, is opposition. In this research, while categorizing and criticizing the definitions of proverb, examining the types of oppositions in philosophy and semantics, about a thousand Persian and Chinese proverbs have been classified with a descriptive-analytical method. The result of the research shows that in every proverb we are dealing with some kind of opposition, but the frequency of opposition is different, so that types of connotational opposition and complementary opposition are the most frequent, and lexical opposition is placed in the next category, although we have proverbs that have several types of opposites. Also, in the current research, there was no example of the symmetrical opposition or gradable opposition.