Classifying Speech Acts in English–Vietnamese Proverbs: A Cognitive–Pragmatic Approach

Although scholarship on proverbs has expanded considerably, systematic cross-linguistic analyses anchored in cognitive pragmatics remain limited, particularly with regard to oral traditions and their role in shaping inferential reasoning. This study addresses this gap by examining 300 Vietnamese and English proverbs (150 per language) through the integrated frameworks of speech act theory and cognitive pragmatics. The corpus, systematically categorized into directive, commissive, expressive, representative, and declarative acts, provides the basis for a comparative analysis of speech-act distribution, affective encoding, and metapragmatic explicitness. The analysis suggests that Vietnamese proverbs more frequently employ elliptical structures, metaphorical condensation, and inference-rich packaging rooted in shared cultural schemata, whereas English proverbs more often display greater syntactic explicitness, stronger direct evaluative framing, and relatively lower-context inferential patterns. These tendencies point to culturally inflected differences in pragmatic packaging and inferential preference rather than to wholly distinct pragmatic systems. By bringing indigenous Vietnamese perspectives into dialogue with international theoretical models—most notably Gricean maxims and relevance theory—this study advances an integrated analytical framework for examining pragmatic reasoning in oral traditions. Beyond its theoretical contributions, the study has implications for intercultural communication, second-language pedagogy, and computational modeling of figurative language, positioning proverbs as condensed yet generative microtexts through which inference can be examined across diverse linguistic ecologies. • This study provides a systematic cognitive-pragmatic comparison of 300 Vietnamese and English proverbs. • Vietnamese and English proverbs show broadly similar speech-act repertoires but differ in rhetorical emphasis. • Vietnamese proverbs more often rely on metaphorical compression, indirectness, and higher inferential demand. • English proverbs more often display explicit evaluative framing and stronger metapragmatic directness. • The findings support a culturally calibrated model of proverb pragmatics with implications for pedagogy, translation, and NLP.