The Effect of the Function of Livelihood Social Elements in Image Schemas of Taleqan Dialect Proverbs: A Socio-Cognitive Linguistic Approach

Language and culture are two important factors in every Linguistic Society that have mutual relations with each other. Language as a communication device not only has a cultural history, but also reflects the cultural factors of that linguistic society.  There are many elements and factors that reflect the culture of a language. One of them is proverbs that are considered as part of oral and folk literature of a language and show the history, culture, thoughts, wisdom, experience, way of thinking, nature, occasions, and civilization of a society. Proverbs are made based on the human schemas and mental spaces.  So it is necessary to study proverbs from a socio-cognitive perspective. In this research, the effect of Taleghan climate and livelihood elements and the existing image schemas in Taleghan proverbs were investigated within Lakoff & Johnson’s cognitive approach. For this purpose, a number of 865 proverbs have been selected from the book "An Introduction to the dialect & culture of Taleqan “. Then the type of image schemas in these proverbs were identified and afterwards the effect of climate & livelihood elements in schematic structure of these proverbs was researched and explained. The results show that the most frequent image schema is containment schema which is related to the climate and livelihood elements of Taleqan society such as jobs and customs.