Snowclones and Proverbs in a Cognitive-Linguistic Perspective

Description

Snowclones (schematic stock phrases) have a bad reputation among linguists and professional writers alike and are seen as tokens of lazy writing. However, there is more to snowclones than just that. Some snowclones – which we call proverbial snowclones – display degree of proverbiality to the extent that it can be argued that they occupy a grey zone between proverbs proper and semi-schematic idioms. Moreover, they are often intertwined with (pop) cultural literacy and seem to serve a number of social and communicative functions. Drawing on theoretical insights from construction grammar and cognitive-semantic approaches to socio-cultural cognition, this presentation reports on three simple corpus-based analyses of proverbial snowclones within the English language – namely, the only good X is a dead X, one does not simply X into Y, and in X no one can hear you Y. More specifically, this presentation addresses features of their usage patterns, such as productivity, epistemic status marking, and co-occurrence with co-textual topics, so as to address their potential proverbial nature

Period	16 Nov 2022
Event title	Norm, Variation, Language Change 2022
Event type	Seminar
Location	Copenhagen, Denmark
Degree of Recognition	Local