아프리카ㆍ중동

The content of this article can be summarized as follows. (1) Sections of Hausa proverbs closely interact with each other through varied types of correspondence of identical elements across sections. This interaction eventually produces inter-section balance and/or cohesion, which underlies the poetic organization of many Hausa proverb texts. There are two basic assumptions that initiated this study. The first is that Hausa proverbs, as is often the case with many other African oral traditions, are highly abundant in poetic elements. The second is that these elements can be identified and described in a systematic literary manner. (2) Proverbs have the capability of 'potential other reference' as against ‘limited to current reference’, and are internally equipped with a certain mechanism which gives this capability to them: thus, proverbs consist of foreground and background. Foreground refers to the contextual entities within a given situation and background describes the action or state of those entities. Proverbs can be categorized into four groups according to whether or not figurative language appears in the foreground and background. Some important pairs of contrastive elements emerge from this dichotomy: presence vs. absence of tension, context-bound vs. context-free, analogy vs. metaphor, etc.