ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a piece of research into the interplay between cognitive linguistics and proverbs. Its major aim is to suggest a cross-cultural cognitive linguistic approach to the treatment of proverbs to satisfy a lack within Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT)—both its early version (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff & Turner 1989), and its more recent version, Cultural Cognitive Theory (Kövecses 2005). It first briefly reviews cognitive linguistics and describes some theoretical issues in the study of proverbs within CMT. Then, recommends a cognitive approach to cross-cultural metaphoric variation and provides illustrative examples of source-target domain mappings within some animal-related proverbs from Kabyle, Arabic, French, and English in comparison and contrast.
