Cultural scripts in English and Polish proverbs: tradition and innovation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the reflection of selected cultural scripts in Anglo-American and Polish proverbs. The analysis concentrates on the way proverbs reflect two characteristic patterns of ‘Anglo’ culture identified by Anna Wierzbicka in her book English: Meaning and Culture (2006), i.e. ‘the respect for facts’ and ‘the value of personal autonomy’, and the cultural scripts associated with them. The study is based on proverb collections and the author’s corpus of texts with proverbs compiled from Polish Internet sources. Limited as a study based on such sources inevitably is, it does, nevertheless, demonstrate that proverbs do reflect cultural norms. It also shows that some culture specific Anglo-American proverbs are now used in Polish (e.g. Facts are stubborn things, Figures don’t lie or A man’s home is his castle), thus providing evidence that the influence of English and American ways on Polish goes beyond the level of individual words and expressions.

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