THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF PROVERBIAL DIALOGUE

Abstract

Language communicates the intention of the speaker to the hearer on every occasion it is used in any human interaction. Linguistics  claims that language use has a semantic as well as the pragmatic  content; language use is spiced with proverbs in Nigeria. There has  been little or no investigation on the communicative value of the semantic and pragmatic content of proverbial language use. This study seeks to discover whether these mantic or pragmatic content of proverb in language use is crucial for communication to take place. A pragma-semantic approach is employed to investigate some  proverbs using arithmetic progression method of selection. The  findings confirm that proverbial constatives have both semantic and pragmatic contents; nevertheless, it is revealed that the pragmatic content of proverbial language use communicates the intention of the speaker and therefore, significant for communication between  the speaker and the addressee of the proverb.