WATCHED POTS DO BOIL:
PROVERB INTERPRETATION THROUGH CONTEXTUAL
ILLUSTRATION
This paper will explore the sociolinguistic and
metaphoric development of young children's thought and
language processes as revealed through their informal
discussions of proverbs. Groups of children aged 6 through 9
were engaged by this investigator in open-ended, yet
focused, conversation which enabled them to apply their own
life experiences to the base meanings of proverbs, and thus
to abstract them differently and more effectively than
standard proverb tests permit. Among the study's significant
findings were (1) that working-class black and middle-class
white children were able to reason metaphorically and
abstractly, comprehend and coin proverbs at an age eralier
than reported in the literature; (2) that this finding is
methodologically dependent; and (3) that this discursive
form of social interaction has important implications for
teaching, for diagnosis, and for evaluation.
The present paper derives from my dissertation, The
Proverb Moves the Mind: Proverb Abstraction Through Social
Interaction (1982). It will examine social knowledge as
an important stimulant to abstraction, and consider the
sources, subjects, and themes of the rich contextual
illustrations created by children to interpret and argue
proverb meaning. The children's fertility in drawing, from
even the smallest corners of their lives, appropriate
applications of the hugest concerns of proverbs, suggests a
level of communicative and metaphoric competence with which
they are seldom credited.
I should like to show how that brief and pithy folk form,
the proverb (to which young children are likely to have had
little exposure), can, through the magical linkage of
metophor and life event, provoke serious reasoning - -
analytic, abstractive, and analogical. Each is a process
likely to culminate in skills of immense importance to
self-functioning, and certainly to school and life success.
My thesis, built of a series of live interrelated issues,
is:
That proverbs function for young children
discussing them, as triggers or entry points to a
sociolinguistic use of events in their lives, and thus
demonstrate their capacity to use language
sociolinguistically.
That proverbs provoke problem-solving.
That issues in proverbs' base meanings stimulate
dialogue and interaction, which emerge as Contextual
Illustration, and testify to young children's
communicative and reasoning competence.
That the combination of Contextual Illustration,
issues generated by the proverb tenor, and a
discursive form of social interaction act to stimulate
divergent thinking, a prized corollary of the creative
non-standard response.
That the debate and discussion of proverb meaning
generated among heterogeneously grouped children,
i.e., abstract and concrete thinkers, is to the
benefit of both, but of special value to the latter
whose thought processes are often expanded by
interaction with more able peers.
Examining each of these points in turn through excerpts
of dialogue and portions of transcript, I shall, in
conclusion, look at some of the implications for future
research within the proverb itself. But first a few
facts.
The Study
The original study was built on a assumption born of many
years of work with young children and their teachers: that
children have untapped capacity for abstractive thought at
an age earlier than assumed, and that there is a
relationship between abstraction and its verbalization
requiring metalinguistic ability. Further, that neither
standardized tests nor workbook activities (both of which
predominate in many schools) test or tap metalinguistic
ability and, therefore, scarcely demonstrate children's
capacity for divergent or metaphoric thinking. But by
building inquiry into an expressive language mode, one would
have the opportunity to both assess and develop diverse reasoning skills, among them: analysis,
generalization, abstraction, deduction, inference,
paraphrase, and critical thinking. Only one method could
satisfy these dual demands -- a discursive approach in an
informal, open-ended setting in which small groups of
children were free to explore their own ideas, test the
truth of the meanings they thought up, apply them contextually and experientially, while continually
being challenged to do more of the same.
Theory...
Theoretical support for this approach came from the work
of Lev Vygotsky (1978) who saw that it is "through
problem-solving under adult guidance or in collaboration
with more capable peers" (p. 86) that the potential level of a child's development is most likely to be reached.
The dialectical process between Teaching Strategy and Child
Response is fed by the discussion and debate of proverbs and
interlaced with deliberately provocative and often demanding
questions. What emerges is far different from what most
one-to-one interviews yield: more wandering, more waste, but
also far more richness. As a response vehicle, it is also
much broader based, vis a vis its allowance for correct
response, than any standardized test or response form. But
perhaps its major virtue among its many is that, being process-oriented, it lets us get in there to see the
workings of the watch while it helps to make the watch
work.
At the core of Vygotsky's thesis is his belief that the
developmental process is out of synch with the learning
process, that is "on dealy," as it were, and that this
non-coincidental sequence creates zones of proximal
development. Vygotsky defines the Zone of Proximal
Development as the distance between actual and potential
developmental levels as assessed not by independent, but by
collaborative problem-solving when stimulated by the
aforementioned adults and peers. Contrary to the view of
much of contemporary Western psychology, this adult-peer
assistance is not perceived by Vygotsky as a crutch, but as
a spur to the child's problem-solving performance,
the result of which yields a better index of his/her
mental development than does solo performance. His
unrelenting search for what he calls the "psychological
structure" (i.e., processes) underlying behavioral
organization has been a stimulus to inquiry into the verbal
thought of the children who informed this study.
...And Practice
Proverb discussions were held with a total of 48
children: 28 children (15 boys; 13 girls) between the ages
of 6 and 9 in a nearly all-black public school in Brooklyn,
N. Y.; and 20 children (10 boys; 10 girls) in a nearly
all-white third grade of a Manhattan private school. Most of
the discussions occurred with the black groups (22) and only
3 with the white. Because of the imbalance in the number of
discussion sessions, what seems to be an equally distributed
population actually isn't. Many more black (20) than white
(6) children repeated sessions, thereby affording the former
far more opportunity for rehearsal than the latter.
For the reader to participate in the discussion that
follows, it will be useful to share the common language of
definition. A Glossary of coding terms used in the analysis
of the children's Abstraction Strategies, and the Teaching
Strategies that generated them, follows.
GLOSSARY
ABSTRACTION STRATEGIES (5 of the 7 used to
abstract proverb meaning in the excerpts that follow):
Concrete Explanation (C.E.) is a
literal definition or explanation with no shift in
semantic domain, in which the explanation usually
offers a rationale for heeding the event referred to by
the proverb, or warns of the consequences for failing to
do so.
Paraphrase (Para.) is a restatement of the
proverb with increased explicitness without enlarging the
reference or shifting the semantic domain. Because it
puts the proverb into other words, it presupposes
abstractive ability, but is neither a full abstraction of
the base meaning, nor a Concrete Explanation.
Contextual Illustration (C.I.) is an illustration of the proverb meaning by means of an
naecdotal application generally drawn from the
child's experience. It is often quite elaborated and
always involves a shift in semantic domain. Summary Abstraction (S.A.) is an abstraction of
the proverb meaning in the form of a summary
statement which, because it is a generalized
application of the proverb to many relevant
situations, has a wider span of reference than the single
example of the C.I.
Metaphoric Generation (M.G.) is the act of
either creating an original proverb through Coinage (Coin.) or Spawn (a variation which
models the actual proverb); or by correctly applying one
through Appropriate Use of the Proverb (Approp.
Use) in a variety of contextually relevant
ways.
TEACHING STRATEGIES (Here, too, a selective list
referring, without definition, to only those strategies used
below and whose code names are likely to be unclear.)
Confirming (Confrmg.) Initiating Collaboration (Initiatg. Collab.) Shift in Semantic Domain (Shift in Seman.
Dom.) Paraphrasing Child's Contextual Illustration (Para. Ch's. C.I.) Source of Connection (Source of Conn.) Supporting Specific Child (Supptg. Specif.
Ch.) Orchestrating (Orchstrg.) Telescopic Reduction (Tel. Reduct.) Umbrella Question (Umbrel. Ques.)
I. YOUNG CHILDREN MAKE SOCIOLINGUISTIC APPLICATIONS OF
PROVERBS
My interest here is (1) to demonstrate how these young
children have drawn upon the rich communicative resources of
their spech community, and (2) to examine the sociocultural
base of this organization through their use of personal
experience, family facts, television, and the street. My
concern is with the nature of their thought and language
processes, rather than with the quantification of responses,
with the careful analysis of select cases, rather than with
a survey of all the evidence. This was facilitated in the
original study by using the open-ended interviews as primary data, the qualitative and supportive evidence
thus represented by the quantity of confirming examples.
Therefore, though denied the definitive results of standard
task-oriented stimulus-response research, we are enabled by
such a process-oriented analysis to participate in and
benefit from insights that come from presentation of the new
data, and to analyze for ourselves the cross-fertilization
resulting from the multiple interactions.
The child's use of a Contextual Illustration is a far
more complete performance than that of a Summary Abstraction
because it reveals a kind of social appropriateness and
demonstrates that the child knows how to use the
proverb contextually. I suspect that one of the earmarks of
this sociolinguistic usage is its constant pragmatism; another is its high degree of personalization.
Family
The theme of family relationships is a prominent
one in the children's discussions. Issues such as parental
control and self-control, for example, mingle freely with
the metaphoric messages of choice and moderation in this
excerpt from 7-year-old Debbie's description of her dilemma
when dealing with the proverb:
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
It means that if you buy you cake, sneak or steal
your cake, and you wanna eat it right away so nobody
know that you stole it... and then if you want [to
keep] your cake, you can't eat it now (i.e., that
desire must be curbed if theft is involved, or else
you'll give yourself away -- and a practical
resolution]. If your mother gonna throw it out and
you say, "I want it mommy!" and then you want to eat
it now. But your mother says, "Well, I'm gonna throw
it out if you wanna eat it right away and get a
stomachache!" (Transcript 6 [hereafter T.],
p.3)
The reason Debbie missed the "moderation" message was
because she was so busy proving the "no win" nature of
what must have been a very real reminiscence triggered by
the proverb. Complete with psychological overtones, it
serves here as a highly personalized anecdote through
which she demonstrates the absence of real choice in the
presence of external control. Not an abstraction, it is
nonetheless an example of how the Contextual Illustration
serves as a venting and rehearsal ground for
ideas.
Sometimes the concerns and issues involving family are
studded with serious ethical questions having to do with
the work ethic, violations of family privacy, and
behavioral taboos. Such was the case in 6-year-old
Steven's hypothetical (?) explanation of the
proverb:
Talk does not cook rice.
Not if you had a job, right? And like a office man
come in and the boss said, "I leave him in there to
see how you work." See now, if the boss go out and you
just be talkin' to him and you gotta take a lot of
stuff down, then you gonna never get it done. And that
job stays open until midnight, and you gonna talk to
the guy until midnight, you get fired! Or else you
don't get a raise until you're ninety!... That's how
my father had... see 'cause like he was a talker!
[Debbie intercepted him sharply]: Keep to
your own business! [And when asked by the
Investigator why, she said with conviction]:
Because if you tell your father's business and then
you go out the room and let everybody hear the tape --
what the children said -- and then everybody gonna
know his father's business!!
[To which Steven replied]: Can I tell you
somethin, Debbie? I'm lying. (T.7, pp. 5-6)
Obviously lying is a less serious infraction than
violating family privacy! This is a remarkable exposition
of complex ideas through a deeply personal and, no doubt,
true situation chosen by this 6-year-old to capture the
meaning of a subtle proverb. He has made the shift from
one behavioral domain (the kitchen) to another (the job)
with such ease, and painted the scene with such elaborate
detail that it is equally easy to get caught in the web
of his tale and forget the very details he uses to build
his case. The web becomes a snare when Debbie uses it to
score him for his serious breach of ethics, and Steven,
with typical bravura (i.e., defensiveness), denies it.
And so, another role played by the Contextual
Illustration is that of a reactive arena for
life-sized issues.
In this next excerpt a mother's influence is felt,
this time in an advisory capacity:
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Richard, aged 7 at the time, agrees.
Yeah, because if you have one bird in your hand,
you would like it more than the other two because you
already have one and you should be satisfied with the
one you have. And you could play with the bird that
you already had but with the other two birds, they
might be too smart and you can't catch them. And you
can't do anything with them. Like my mother say, I
should be satisfied with what I got. (T. 16, p.
3)
Notice how thoroughly pragmatic Richard is. Take what
you can get (what you've already got). Don't overreach.
Selling us on the advantages of his approaching decision
by laying out the practical features, he finally arrives
(last sentence) at both his positive evaluation of the
proverb situation and an abstraction of the proverb's
base meaning. How? Through a process that synthesizes those particular experiences and events in his own life which fit his evaluation
and comprehension of the proverb's base meaning.
The themes proliferate -- the Contextual Illustrations
serving as abundant conveyors of personal behavioral
standards which sometimes talk of the children's need for
independence, of the virtues of patience, caution,
satisfaction with what one has, and warn of the
consequences of bad behavior. With respect to their
families, they thought and talked about their parent's
work lives, especially jobs -- keeping and losing
them, getting better ones; the work ethic and the
punishment incurred when it is violated; sick
relatives -- caring for them and the consequences of
their death (which at least one child saw as the choice
of either becoming a "rich angel" or "going down to the
devil and getting stuck with a fork!"); a brother's
chronic stealing and the role of the other as
informer (vis a vis "Do unto others..."). Clearly,
families matter.
Friends
With respect to other social relationships, the
primary one to which all children repeatedly referred was friendship. Distinctly different concerns were
reflected by the middle and lower-class groups, but all
spoke deeply and intensely of their need for reciprocity
in friedship, responsibility and trust, love, generosity,
and sharing; worry about self-centeredness, rejection,
and betrayal.
Break one link and the whole chain falls apart was an extraordinarily popular vehicle for these 7- and
8-year-old concerns:
OOOh! [said Vincent] I think I know! Like
you have some friends and you break off, and you still
have more friends left. [But Mike could not
agree.] Yes, but there is some way it could fall
apart. Let's say all the other kids like the kid that
you break off with, the best. And if you don't like
him, they don't like you either 'cause you don't like
their friends. So the whole relationship of all the
kids breaks apart.
[A persuasive argument, but Mike's twin, Josh,
was dubious]: Yeah, but it's very rare for that to
happen. [Karen saw it from yet another
perspective]:
If we had a group of people who were really good
friends, and we did a lot of things together, and we
stood up for ourselves and stood up for our friends,
and if we were suddenly spilt in half -- I mean, you
know, parted -- we probably couldn't manage. (T.10,
p.2; T.19, pp.4-5)
Especially prominent among the lower-class group were
frequent references to fighting and stealing,
almost always accompanied by moralizing, strategies for
handling, or practical solutions to the problems caused
thereby. We can attribute much of this to TV exposure,
yet streetwise children living in poor neighborhoods are
often victims themselves, and there is no question but
that their many references to bike thefts, informing, and
punishment come from experiences they themselves had and
learned to cope with.
The rain does not all fall on one roof provoked this fine example from Richard:
I know! I know! I was getting ready to say... I
mean, like this could mean trouble. Like
trouble doesn't have to fall upon just one person. You
could be doing something and then all of a sudden,
trouble could be lurking upon two people, four, or
even how many!
Like if two people have a bike, you could be riding
through the park. Then about two boys with two
knives come up there, and then that would be
trouble fallin' on not just one person, but both of
the people. (T. 15. Prov. #4)
Being a victim of crime is one thing; being a witness
to it has its own frightening and sobering
consequences.
One does not have to learn how to fall into a pit.
All it takes is the first step, the others take care of
themselves.
[Vincent has just delivered an elaborate
Contextual Illustration in which a witness to a murder
and burglary becomes the victim of the criminals he
has reported. Just prior to this, Richard offered one
in which a socially conscious bystander to a beating
gets beaten himself. People ignoring his cries for
help say: "No way! You wasn't minding your own
business and you got into there, so now you're gonna
have to get yourself out."]
[Not understanding Vincent's connection between
the two, the Investigator said]: "Now I'm lost
here, because I'm not sure how you hook that up to the
proverb.
Said Vincent: Like the same thing that Richard
said: Mind your own business! If you don't, it leads
to lots of trouble. (T. 15, p. 4)
Whether learning to cope or protectively detach, the
lessons of the street -- suspicion and caution -- are
well learned by our inner-city young.
If the fish had not opened its mouth, it would not
have been caught.
[Said Richard, now aged 8]: I think it
means you shouldn't fall for everything...
[S.A.] If you see something that somebody is
offering you (C.I.1] -- the fish didn't
see the man up there -- but if you see somebody
offering you something, you shouldn't take it.
[C.E.] [He develops his point with a story
of his being offered candy by a girl, refusing it,
being given it again, and throwing it down a street
drain because he didn't know what was in it!]
[C.I.2]
Notable here is how Richard launched the definition
with a crisp Summary Abstraction, forgetting the "fish"
and starting instead with "you." Using the Concrete
Explanation of the fish to generalize his advice, he then
draws upon the surety of experience to strengthen the
equation.
What are the likely sources of such Contextual
Illustrations as these? Most probably television, along
with the aforementioned street. Combing the transcripts
for these programs most frequently referred to, we find
comedy shows, monsters (Godzilla, King Kong, and Dracula
heading the list), cartoons, police and crime shows. Yet
it is not so much the individual program as the general
content of crime, cops and robbers, and bank thefts that
seems to saturate the children's conversations. They
talked of how bad behavior can lead you into a mess; guns
and money lead to crime, and money to war (in an
extraordinary sequence of Vincent's vis a vis More
haste, less speed, in which, focusing on "less," he
points out that we'd fare better with less of all
these evils for "most wars are started for money, too!"
[T. 14A, Prov. #3]) A year later, in a discussion
of Don't bite off more than you can chew, he
reflects his concerns about war by focusing on the
element of "excess" in the proverb: "The wars around the
world -- like if you fight too much, the world will be totally destroyed! If the people fight and they
kill other people, there might be no people left in this
world" (T. 21, Prov #7). Interestingly, the violence that
has entered their young lives does not lure; rather it
repels and they judge it harshly -- or lament it. Said
Richard of Time passes away, but things remain: "Like in caveman times, people they used to be fighting a
lot... and now, still people fight a lot" (T. 22,
Prov. #1).
The social and moral consciousness revealed in these
powerful issues are not without the sophistication that
can only come from children having to learn too soon
about the inequities of life -- children not without
their opinions about the causes of the injustices they
see. Going to jail as a consequence of killing in
self-defense (caused by being mugged) was a point Richard
made to illustrate the injustice of the law (vis a vis Don't bite off more than you can chew). Suffering
or being hurt as a result of doing a good deed was used,
as we saw in Ex. 8, as an argument for minding one's own
business.
With these few (and in my view) remarkable examples,
we have but tapped the surface of these children's
reservoir of social knowledge. Could it have been tapped
into further and for a longer period of time, it most
certainly would have generated its own metaphors. With
replication, it may yet.
The most impressive conclusion to be drawn from the
wealth of evidence that children can abstract proverbs
and think metaphorically far better and much earlier than
we think they can is that we really know very little
about how they manage it. What makes some children leap
to the abstractive response, for example, while others
require small, slow steps to get there. Of particular
interest would be to repeat these proverb discussion with
different populations. Variations in composition
according to race, SES, cultural and ethnic group, sex,
and group size might reveal response patterns different
from those presently encountered. Clearly race, SES,
culture, and ethnicity would be most likely to reflect
sociolinguistic variability because of the attending
environmental differences. I would therefore favor
varying these constellations first, and would welcome
response from interested colleagues.
We might also speculate on those factors inherent in
the proverb itself that could influence or shape the
abstraction. For instance, what is the relationship of
proverb strucutre to its abstractibility? Are certain
strucutres more accessible than others? Do imperative
proverbs, for example, tend to be conceived more
literally than metaphorically? Does their didacticism
impress their messages more readily than other
grammatical patterns do? Looking back at
Silverman-Weinreich's (1961) work, is it possible that
some of the grammatical patterns she has identified are
more conducive to abstraction than others? Could such
grammatical markers as parallelism or the use of generic
and abstract subjects make a difference? Could semantic
markers like allegory, irony, or personification; phonic
devices of rhyme, alliteration, and brevity be
determinants?
Proverbs are worth ponering; quite young children can
tackle them, work through their complex analogic and
metaphoric structures, and even fashion new and credible
forms of their own. One has but to recognize and
strengthen children's competence -- and perhaps to
remember - - that watched pots do boil!
NOTES
Previously published in Proverbium 2 (1985), pp. 145-183.
Permission to publish this article granted by Proverbium (Editor: Prof. Wolfgang Mieder,
University of Vermont, USA).
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Many Nations. New York: Lothrop,
Lee, Shepard.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara.
(1973). Toward a theory of proverb meaning. Proverbium 22, 821-827.
Pasamanick, J. (1982). The Proverb
Moves the Mind: Abstract and Metaphoric Thinking
in Children 6-9. (Ph.D. dissertation, Yeshiva
University) Dissertation Abstracts
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DDJ82-20394.
Pasamanick, J (1983) Talk does cook rice: Proverb abstraction through social interaction. International Journal of the Sociology of Lnguage,
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Silverman-Weinreich, B. (1961).
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Language. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T.
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Judy Pasamanick
NEH Folklore Institute
Teachers College
Columbia University
New York, New York 10027
USA
Forum
