The discourse on weather in Vietnamese folk sayings and proverbs from the perspective of Ecolinguistics

Abstract

From the perspective of ecolinguistics, this research was conducted to explore the interaction between human ideology and the ecosystem through linguistic means by understanding groups of vocabulary and the semantic relations of these groups of words in weather discourse. Primarily designed as a qualitative descriptive study with a corpus of collected Vietnamese folk sayings and proverbs, the study incorporates a quantitative portion typical of corpus linguistics for a generalized tendency of weather discourse. Using the deixis framework proposed by Bang and Døør (1993) and considering 136 discourse tokens containing lexical items about the weather, the study classified the corpus into two groups: (1) folk sayings and proverbs about weather phenomena and their impacts on life and (2) folk sayings and proverbs about human behavior with nature. The findings showed that Vietnamese folk sayings and proverbs embraced all ecolinguistic characteristics. In particular, the group of folk sayings and proverbs about weather phenomena and their impact on life presented descriptive characteristics (color, sound), reference (rain, sun, wind, river, ocean, mountain, moon, sky, etc.), spatial deixis (east, west, south, north) and temporal deixis (morning, evening, day, month, year). The group of folk sayings and proverbs about human behavior showed the interaction among language - environment - ideology. The research opens up prospects for applying ecolinguistics in text studies