Uprooted and replanted: recontextualizing a genre.

Abstract

Decontextualized cultural material presents an interpretive challenge. A list of proverbs gives no indication of the range of social purposes for which speakers deploy them, nor how the proverbs came about. Such proverbs could easily be deemed as worthless as potshards excavated without attention to their archaeological context; yet this essay uses a corpus of proverbs without conversational context to explore the extent and limits of interpretation via linguistic and anthropological means. Context can be discovered as discourse chunks such as proverbs move between communicative genres. When speakers of a language are, in addition, shifting to using a dominant language, proverbs are an important resource of rememberers, one that may also be the locus of language shift to that dominant language. The analysis draw on language contact and narrative memory to explore how some Turkic Salar speakers (ISO 639-3: slr) deploy this flexible medium.