2 Jamaican Creole Proverbs from the Perspective of Contact Linguistics 1.1.1. Subject matter The life of any society is based on its discursive practices (Chruszczewski 2006) because, according to Berger and Luckman ([1966] 1967: 53), “[a] ll human activity is subject to habitualization.” What is more, “[a]ny action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort […]” (ibidem), and it is proverbs that usually constitute such patterns and are repeatable with an economy of effort within changing non-verbal settings. The consistency and inherent cultural power of the repeated proverb model varies from culture to culture; however, the model appears to be particularly strong within many African and Caribbean speech communities. One of the crucial research objectives of the study presented here was to research the type of information that is conveyed and transmitted by means of the texts of Jamaican Creole proverbs. The starting point for my investigations was my belief that the extralinguistic reality (culture included) is to a great extent a product of human verbal (and non-verbal) interactions. It is due to these interactions that both language and culture can simultaneously be regarded as both a structure and a process. In theory, only prime ethnic groups that do not interact with other groups because of the natural conditions that isolate them from others are fully uniform and culturally separate (see Kłoskowska 1996: 40). My research only proves the above, showing that when two or more cultures interact, we can be faced not only with reciprocal linguistic and cultural borrowings but also, under certain circumstances, we can witness the birth and development of a completely new language and culture. This is the case for Jamaican Creole, which is an example of how two or more interacting speech communities can give rise to a new speech community which nevertheless does indeed retain many cultural elements and linguistic patterns of the cultures in contact, and Jamaican Creole proverbs fully mirror the aforementioned changes. 1.1.2. Research perspective By means of the contact linguistics perspective one can research Jamaican creole proverbs as instances of verbal texts which linguistically develop in accordance with the already established socio-cognitive patterns of the speech community under discussion. With reference to the above, one has to agree with Els Oksaar (1996: 1) that “[l]anguage contact gives rise to various interactions in the cognitive-emotional realm of human beings, since language has always existed and developed in a biological and social context as a typ-
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTE5NDY5MQ==