Plant Paremias in Kazakh and Chinese: Conceptual Metaphor and Cultural-Pragmatic Coding

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of plant-related paremiological units in Kazakh and Chinese from the perspectives of conceptual metaphor theory, cultural conceptualisation and cultural-pragmatic coding. The aim of the study is to identify how plant images model concepts of human development, environment, labour, education, time, kinship and social relations in a selected bilingual corpus.

The term paremia is used in a broad sense: in addition to folk proverbs and sayings, the corpus includes proverbially used aphoristic expressions, chengyu-type units and short classical formulas that have acquired stable didactic circulation. The material consists of 50 Kazakh and 50 Chinese units. Each unit was coded according to plant component, source domain, target domain, metaphorical function and emotional-pragmatic orientation.

The results show that in both languages plant imagery functions as a productive source domain for conceptualising human formation and social experience. In the Kazakh subcorpus, the images of root, tree, grain, sowing and flower are more often associated with formative environment, communal support, labour and ecological embeddedness. In the Chinese subcorpus, the images of tree, root, leaf, flower, seed and harvest more frequently activate semantic fields of time, education, opportunity, intergenerational continuity and consequences of action. These differences are interpreted not as fixed cultural traits, but as cognitive-pragmatic tendencies within the selected corpus. The findings may be useful for paremiology, translation studies, intercultural communication and the teaching of Kazakh and Chinese.

Keywords: paremia; conceptual metaphor; plant imagery; Kazakh; Chinese; cultural-pragmatic coding.