PHONOSTYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF ARMENIAN DIALECTAL PROVERBS

Abstract

In the historical course of language development, colloquial varieties—dialects and vernacular speech—infuse the literary language with vital material through their immediate and natural linguistic cognition. In this regard, folk proverbs and sayings possess exceptional value, as they perpetually delineate the boundaries of national thought, worldview, and cultural values (Hasan-Rokem, 2000). The syntactic and stylistic elements of oral speech have been shaped over centuries, continuously evolving and spreading. As a result of centuries-long refinement, the folk utterance condenses within itself not only ethnographic and pragmatic-ethical tenets but also demonstrates the full diversity of the language's structural possibilities. In this context, reduplicative formations and phonological correspondences merit particular attention, as they perform critically important stylistic, semantic, and cognitive functions in dialectal phraseology (Mieder, 2004; Taylor, 1931).

Reduplication constitutes one of the primary means of word formation and semantic intensification in numerous languages worldwide, including those of the Indo-European language family. Since the earliest periods of Armenian language development, a substantial corpus of words has been created through lexical and morphemic repetition. According to historical-comparative studies, approximately five hundred reduplicative formations were actively employed in Classical Armenian, particularly in fifth-century literary works and Biblical translations (Acharyan, 1957, p. 10). This clearly attests that root or word reduplication is not a linguistic coincidence or merely a manifestation of early phonological development in child speech (Fee & Ingram, 1982), but rather a fundamental regularity stemming from the grammatical and morphological templates of the language (Inkelas & Zoll, 2005; Inkelas, 2014).