The aesthetic consideration of proverbs and their influence on discourse: a literary and pragmatic analyses of some Akan proverbs

Abstract

Abstract: Proverbs, in general, are employed not only for their functionality but also for their aesthetic or literary reasons which render them effective in discourse (Yankah, 1989; Dipio, 2019). This paper sought to explore the aesthetic nature of proverbs and their effects on discourse. It also aimed to find out the extent to which the characteristics of written literature could be found in proverbs which are the product of oral literature. The questions which underpin this research are: What are the aesthetic qualities embedded in Akan proverbs? To what extent do they impact on proverbial discourse? To be able to find answers to these questions, we adopted the traditional library research approach to select sixteen (16) Akan proverbs from books and journal articles for our literary and pragmatic analyses. The findings show that literary devices present in novels, poems, and other documentary forms of literature are equally seen in Akan proverbs. They also reveal that the rhetoric figures in proverbs aid the proverbial message to appeal to the human senses for a better understanding by the interlocutor. The aim of this paper is to examine some literary devices in Akan proverbs and what they add to the proverbial message.

Keywords

• proverb
• aesthetic
• discourse
• akan
• literary devices