Article Sidebar
Article Details
Creative Commons License
Attribution-Noncommercial- Noderivates 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0): The license allows others to “download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially” (Source: https:creativecommons.org/licenses).
Copyright
The copyright of all papers published in Legon Journal of the Humanities is vested in the journal. By agreeing to publish the accepted version of the paper in LJH, contributors automatically cede copyright of the manuscript to the journal. This notwithstanding, contributors may use parts of their published articles for non-commercial purposes, e.g., course material, conferences, and academic profile webpage.
Access and Attribution
While LJH published papers (new and archived) can be freely downloaded from its website in compliance with its gratis open access policy, hard copies of current and recent issues as well as offprints of specific papers can only be provided on demand.
Citation of a paper from LJH should include name of quoted author, journal title, volume, number, title of paper, page, year of publication, and Digital Object Identifier (DOI)/Uniform Resource Locator(URL).
Main Article Content
Proverbs in marriage: Counselling role and implications
Abstract
The Akans of Ghana perceive marriage as an important ritual and an aspect of their socio-cultural life. Because of the importance attached to marriage and due to the fact that it is a preserve for the matured in society, the language used for its contraction is sophisticated and infused with proverbs. In recent times, the role of proverbs as a marriage-counselling tool has been overlooked in contemporary counselling. This paper, from a Pragmatic and Relevance Theory (RT) perspective, looked at the counselling role Akan proverbs play in marriage contraction. This descriptive qualitative study purposively selected proverbs in three episodes in different contexts of marriage contraction to see how they were used as counselling tools. The analysis of the data indicated that proverbs play a major counselling role in marriage. The counselling roles concentrated on themes like patience, co-operation, respect, sex, self-denial, hard work, faithfulness, loyalty, humility, child bearing and caring, and love. The implication is that contemporary professional marriage counsellors and priests should employ proverbs in their counselling sessions because proverbs portray what the Akan cherish as their worldview and an embodiment of their soul. This will ensure a clear understanding of the complexities of marriage.
