Abstract:
Proverbial expressions and aphorism are short witty lubricants of
communicative events which are essentially used in achieving farreaching
effects of language use. In the African setting generally,
and in the Yoruba culture in particular, the effectiveness of
communicative mode is measured by the extent to which proverbs
have been deployed to ‘oil the wheel’ of discourse. Hence, the
foregrounding principle becomes relevant in the stylo-rhetorical
study of proverbs whose functional essence rises beyond the literal
communicative function of language in the commonplace. This
paper reports the peculiar linguistic artistry employed in the recreation
of typical Yoruba proverbs rendered in English language,
using proverbs in randomly selected literary pieces as reference
points. The study reveals that the sociological construct of language
use is the nuclear source of linguistic expression, as the crop of
linguistic configurations which are indices of creativity, drift and
shift evident in the sampled proverbs was basically constrained by
nuances of the motivating socio-cultural background which
triggered their use in the first place.