The Speech Acts of Advice and Warning in some Kurdish Proverbs
Abstract
This study investigates the two directive speech acts of advice and warning in some Kurdish proverbs. Its main aim is to find out whether or not these two types of speech acts share some semantic, pragmatic and structural features. To achieve the aims of the study, the following hypotheses are investigated: 1. Indirect speech acts are more likely to occur in proverbs expressing advice and warning than direct ones.2. Declarative sentences are expected to be more recurrent in the realization of the speech acts of advice and warning.3.No passive constructions are expected in the data. The data chosen for analysis consist of 14 proverbs. The analysis of the data is based on an eclectic model integrating Wiersbecas(1987) semantic model of speech act verbs and Searles(1969,1979) model of speech acts in addition to Lyons(1977) concept of Kernel sentence. The application of the model to the selected data has verified the validity of the three hypotheses above. It has also revealed that semantically, the meanings of proverbs are always metaphorical rather than literal and that the speech act theory can be applied to proverbs since they are used in everyday conversation to give advice, warn people, etc.