The Syntactic Formulas Used in Food and Eating Proverbs in Jordanian Arabic: A Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

The present study focuses on studying colloquial Jordanian proverbs and sayings, particularly food and saying proverbs. It employs a descriptive research design to examine the syntactic aspects of those proverbs and sayings. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to gather the data from the informants. The current study came up with a set of conclusions. Proverbs related to food and eating are similar to other kinds of proverbs regarding the utilization of syntactic aspects. Furthermore, it appears that these proverbs are limited to specific syntactic structures, namely, imperative, interrogative and verbless clauses in terms of their syntactic structures. To be more accurate, the verbless clause is the most 51 prominent structure (11 proverbs), then the imperative form (8 proverbs) and the interrogative (5 proverbs) one respectively.