PROVERB AND REPRESENTATION IN IGBO ETHNIC-SEMANTIC DISCOURSE SITUATION

Abstract

In our social world, proverbs remind us of our values in the constantly evolving society, through its metadiscoursal activities in human development, and in social structure of human living. They are used in different situations or contexts to accommodate people, to share experiences within the psycho social domain, and this domain affects diverse identity, ideology and social standings. Therefore, their use must be functional to accommodate every peculiarity of human thoughts in communicational situations. This paper, therefore, looks at the philosophical sphere of metacommunication through the rendition of proverbs, in the context of their metafunctional expressiveness. By focusing on some of the concepts such as intellectualism, wisdom and understanding which are immanent in analysis, these enabled the researchers dug deep into their epistemic responsibilities as the epistemic agents or urns of ideology, culture and interactionism. Relevance theory is employed to explain or analyse how information is processed in discourse. This theory emphasizes on the expression and recognition of intentions in human communications. Five hundred Igbo proverbs were purposively collected from the corpus and observation; twenty proverbs were randomly selected for the analysis. The paper adopted descriptive and qualitative approach to analysis. The study revealed that proverbs engrave the ancient wisdom, the wisdom that is distilled and pristine, which houses the philosophies, ideas and thoughts of a group. Thus, proverbs are the conscience of a people who live in the same physical and metaphysical society; moreover, the valence is reinforced insofar as the discoursal context is between the interactants of the same socio-cultural and linguistic extraction.