Chicken Imagery in Igbo Proverbs: An Ethno-Pragmatics Analysis

Proverbs are important aspects of verbal discourse within the socio-cultural contexts in which knowledge, ideas and emotions are communicated. They reflect people’s perspectives and system of the society, as well as people’s social and cultural orientations, philosophy, and worldviews. They also reflect the psychological and literary make-ups that generally depict the experience of life. In other words, proverbs are used as vehicle to unravel the culture, morals, philosophy, education and religion of the people in an aesthetic manner through contextual setting. This study investigates the imagery exhibited in some selected Igbo proverbs with focus on chicken. Chicken imagery in proverbs has been widely used among the Igbo to portray certain behavioural traits related to human beings. The paper looks at the way chicken is used in Igbo proverbs to depict various human experiences, behaviours and attributions; based on the socio-traditional values, beliefs system and general worldview of the Igbo people. Chicken proverbs are assessed to understand the underlying societal meaning since it is used symbolically to represent humans in all contexts. The study adopts the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which demonstrates the metaphorical ‘mapping’ across conceptual domains; where the animals represent the source domain through which other human experiences are conceptualised as target domain. The data for the study were collected from both primary (interviews, non-participant observations and focus group discussions) and secondary (published materials) sources. The paper finds out that, chicken is used to express figuratively the parent-child relationship among the Igbo. The proverbs are used symbolically to direct people towards positive behaviours; such as tolerance, love, care, forgiveness, unity, patience, cooperation, obedience, kindness, faithfulness and hard-work.