Traces of Communication Phenomenon in Turkish Proverbs and Their Socio-cultural Inferences

Abstract

Proverbs are folkloric products with important references to cultural codes, behavioral patterns, suppositions related to various issues, and imagination of a society. These products may relate to countless topics from the notions of social life, up to approaches to education and social gender issues, from otherization tendencies to paradigms for governance and applications of authority. A particular topic among them is the phenomenon of communication and communication acts. Therefore, proverbs can be scanned for clues explaining communication phenomena, socially approved and proposed communication acts. Starting from this presupposition, the essential aim of the study is the communicational phenomena in Turkish proverbs and to explore explicit and/or hidden messaging related to communicational acts. In this sense, this study is a significant contribution to the formation of a map of communicational semantics of the Turkish society. In this respect, we browsed the proverbs and idioms dictionary of The Turkish Language Association for certain words and conducted thematic analysis of the 77 proverbs that were found in this relation. We found that while many proverbs exerted the importance of verbal communication in relation to the attributes of the utterance and it’s implications; many other proverbs exhibited a rhetoric that affirmed nonverbal communication acts like silence, listening, and reticence. On the other hand, proverbs on visual communication featured messages that proposed that people should not be judged over their appearance and dressing. © 2014, Milli Folklor Dergisi. All rights reserved.