A linguistic study and Analysis of the Position of Women in Persian Proverbs from the Perspective of Naturalization

Proverbs are a part of concise and selective prose in Persian literature, which, in addition to reflecting customs, habits, beliefs and dominant ideologies and society's culture as a whole, are very common and influential due to their narrative structure and form. This research has been done with a focus on, and critical reading of the collection of proverbs of Bahmanyari's proverbs and The Great dictionary of Persian Proverbs, and the analytical approach of the research is based on cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis. In this review, we tried to show how false beliefs about the position of women in the family and society have been formed and naturalized. This attitude aggravates the male/female binaries in patriarchal society and, in addition, it gives value to this opposition and binary. The value that provokes the superior/inferior binary. The damage of such a valuative view becomes apparent when it appears axiomatic and natural and its acceptance becomes not only axiomatic but also a standard for measuring behavior according to the norm and common sense and no one should have doubts about its incorrectness, unnaturalness and unnecessariness. Among the types of speech acts and rhetorical forms, proverbs as accepted speech acts make the naturalization process of this transcendental attitude more obvious. Beliefs such as women's unfaithfulness and lack of secrecy, their inferiority and lack of intellect, being watchful for opportunities to show off, being made only to serve in the kitchen, having children and being responsible for raising them, the need for external beauty as an obligatory thing for them and the need early marriage for girls and many other cases that the process of their reproduction and naturalization are studied and revised in this subject.
 
Extended abstract
1. Introduction
As an essential and rich part of reflecting cultural components, proverbs have always been central to the various fields of cultural studies. Proverbs, while being concise in a linguistic context, convey a wider field of meaningful and conceptual references whose semantic understanding is undoubtedly dependent on the knowledge of the culture that produced them. In defining the concept of culture based on Kroeber's and Clyde Clarke Hohn's six-fold division, which includes almost multiple semantic and implicit inclusions of culture and various theoretical perspectives. It can be understood that culture is an interwoven set of cognitions that are transferred from one generation to another, whether consciously and voluntarily or unconsciously, and forcibly; they build and maintain the intellectual infrastructure of society. They can also recruit people from the community and control it. It can also be added that regardless of its essence and nature, the function of culture is identity-creating, obligatory, organized, and progressive. The progressive perception of culture is an idea that is related to longitudinal and linear definitions of time and history.
Folkloric, folk or popular, is a manifestation of elitist, progressive and transcendental understanding of culture and its function. Folkloric means the culture of the people literally, a culture that is not created by people but is created for them by the culture-creating industries and suggests to them that this is their culture. Therefore, one of the policies of paying attention to the studies of popular culture can be to try to "find the voice of the people, interpret its meaning and strengthen its cultural importance, which of course is a valuable perspective to the studies. Popular culture can also mean controlling the mass of people and directing their desires and wishes to satisfy the interests of those in power and the ruling ideology.
Although there are expanding studies about women, their situation in various fields of society is still problematic and can be discussed and criticized, but we should not neglect the critical view that the universality of theories is neither definitive nor mandatory. Therefore, it is necessary to research women's studies and related theories based on culture, history, and language, and regarding different societies and nations. In this article, by referring to the folkloric and examining proverbs as the linguistic expression of this aspect of culture, we attempt to research the process of femininity and sexual identification by focusing on culture as a concoction and “the Real”.
 
2. Theoretical framework
In this article, we try to analyze the principles of the discourse structuring of proverbs in the context of social and cultural references by examining linguistic methods and actions. For this study, first, by describing the main terms of the research, we will analyze their expressions in the text of proverbs, then we will present a discourse analysis by integrating the essential components of cognitive linguistics. The main question and problem of the research is that how proverbs, as concise phrases and as one of the most practical methods of indirect transmission of message and meaning, accelerate the process of naturalization and consolidation of unnatural meaning?  And, how can we criticize and analyze the ideologizing and ideology continuation of masculine desire by discourse analysis of proverbs?
 
3. Methodology
The research method in this article creates a junction between the categories and concepts of cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis to show the concept of acculturation of language functions. Therefore, the research method is mainly based on the patterns of critical discourse analysis, especially the sociological criticism of this type of analysis. Of course, the cognitive aspect of the research is based on specific virtual, ironic and metaphoric functions of proverbs. Acculturation means believability, automated continuity, and getting hegemonic of the dominant discourse ideology.
 
4. Results & Discussion
The selection and collection of proverbs will be based on two books of proverbs, Dastannameh Bahmaniari and Encyclopedia of Persian Proverbs, and the extraction of proverbs will be based on explicit or implicit signs referring to femininity. In the process of naturalizing gendered themes, some gendered words and expressions do not directly refer to gender in the place of metonymic and ironic usage. However, they reduce the value of the actions of the female gender, the class base, and the position of female agency and subjectivity; they induce and produce a kind of surplus, double and implicit meaning about this gender. By comparing this group of proverbs and their content, it can be seen that women are often referred to as mothers, nannies, housemaids, kitchen maids, maids, young and inexperienced daughters/ bridesmaids, old women, someone's daughter, maidservants, someone’s family, etc., all of which have been represented as value-setting views. And additional meanings such as unfaithfulness, worthlessness, the necessity of sacrifice in the position of a wife, mother, and daughter and in general to a man, such words and lack of secrecy, the necessity of marriage, being deficient in intellect, showing off, etc., as the semantic correlates of the word "woman" are added to it, and as a result a sociolinguistic identity is created for woman based on these distorted stereotypes around the gender structured socially for them.
 
5. Conclusions & Suggestions
In the results obtained from the analysis, attention was paid to these points: firstly, the process of naturalization creates a kind of "generalization" and "replacement." Generalization is expanding fields of use of a word or phrase, as well expanding fields of coded semantics and conceptualization, from "private domain" to "public domain." In addition, the meaning of "replacement" is a kind of semantic permutation, practical, and conceptual substitution of words and phrases that are used in unfamiliar places instead of referring to common meanings and examples, but this "unusuality" is accepted by the discoursal techniques of naturalization and hegemony. Because of this, proverbs have been chosen as concise phrases to show how the linguistic context of these types of expressions is highly effective in accelerating the two processes of generalization and replacement.
 
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