A Linguistic Analysis Of Amharic Proverbs Of Advice

The research had the objective of describing Amharic proverbs of advice from the linguistic point of view. The description included syntactic patterns, stylistic features, and pragmatics of the proverbs. A descriptive method was used for the study of the structure of the proverbs. The proverbs were selected and garnered from written sources, namely Mekuriya (1982) ‘Proverbs’, and Birhanu (1995) ‘Amharic proverb collections’.rnBased on the research objectives, the findings of the analysis of the proverbs are summarized as follows. In terms of syntactic patterns, the study shows that most Amharic proverbs of advice are complex-declarative clauses. Most of the phonetic and stylistic features have been observed. Of these alliteration, rhyme, assonance, ellipsis, parallelism and reduplication are the widely used features that made Amharic proverbs of advice poetic, memorable, and powerful conveyer of message. Furthermore, the study showed that the proverbs are used for advice in relevant contexts, situations, audience and topic that inform and/or advise. Finally, as a concluding remarks, the researcher recommends that other studies be done on the linguistic aspects of other speech acts.

Get Full Work

Report copyright infringement or plagiarism