A Corpus-Based Study of Proverbs in Colloquial Jordanian Arabic: A Socio-Pragmatic Analysis

The current study aims at investigating the colloquial Jordanian proverbs and sayings used among Jordanian people in different contexts. This qualitative study employed two instruments to collect the data, namely, semi-structured interviews and self-report observations. This study, in fact, is based on the corpora of food proverbs, idioms and sayings in Jordanian Arabic. The sources of these proverbs are taken from Jordanian people, books, magazines, articles, internet websites and TV programs. The corpus consisted of 5634 running words that were built from Jordanians’ recorded natural conversations. Those conversations were transcribed into textual data and analyzed using the function of Keyword Analysis of Lancsbox Programme (version 6.0). This study specifically analyzed the proverbs from a pragmatic-linguistic perspective and came up with a set of conclusions. Those proverbs are classified into four different categories as follows: Proverbs Including Body Organs Associated with Eating, Proverbs Referring to the Eating Process Itself, Proverbs Including Tools Used in Eating and Proverbs Including Edible Items.