Happiness in Modern Anglo-American Proverbs: A Linguocultural Study

This study analyses a corpus of 103 Anglo-American proverbs that belong to the thematic field “happiness” found in the two most recent major Anglo-American proverb collections: A Dictionary of American Proverbs, edited by Wolfgang Mieder, Stewart A. Kings-bury, and Kelsie B. Harder (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), and A Dictionary of American Proverbs, edited by Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder, and Fred Shapiro (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012). The aim of the study is to outline and discuss the proverb-based popular notion of happiness in present-day U.S. culture. The research methods involve two steps: the linguocultural approach and its further part, the culturematic analysis, which are intended for explicating the proverb culturemes and messages, and a summary and discussion of the findings obtained via this analysis for outlining the cultural content of the concept of happiness in present-day American society