Anglo-American Paremias Nonce Transformation in the Light of Cognitive-Discursive Approach in Linguistics

Thepresent article studies the phenomenon of occasional modification of proverbs and proverbial expressions as a modern characteristicfeature of different forms of the English language discourse. About 8,000 examples of proverb use in cinematographic, newspaper, publicspeech, and song discourses served as the material for the research. On the basis of our study we can state that proverb modificationis predetermined by cognitive and pragmatic factors. Through creative use of proverbs and proverbial expressions the author can solvethe following pragmatic tasks, which help influence the target audience: attention capturing, expressing attitude and evaluation, creatingstylistic effects (increase of expressivity, emotionality, and creation of individual style). Occasional paroemia modification extends thelinguistic frontiers of culture, reflects new modes of thinking, and shows new directions for action. Thus, the phenomenon of occasionalmodification enables the author to adjust proverbs and proverbial expressions to any discursive situation and results in their transformation.Hence, one of the acutest tasks of paroemiology is registration and analysis of nonce paroemias within the framework of the cognitive-discursive approach in linguistics. Having studied the instances of proverb and proverbial expression use in the above mentionedtypes of the English language discourse, we distinguished the following four groups of novel paroemic formations differentiated on thebasis of the result of the creative use: 1) proverbial hapaxes are tightly connected with their context and have no sense beyond it; theyhave little literary value and, thus, limited effect potential; 2) authors words and expressions on the basis of traditional paroemias;3) antiproverbs, i.e. new paroemic units created on the basis of traditional proverbs and proverbial expressions; they are independentformations having a meaning of their own. Antiproverbs, which use elements of traditional paroemias, express a novel idea; 4) pseudoproverbs,i.e. new paroemic formations built according to the traditional proverbial patterns. We do not consider them proverbs for wedispose of no data on their currency. However, their separate study is deemed important as these formations express some generalizationand use standard proverbial structural-semantic models with frequent application of traditional proverbial markers.

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