Usually the riddles are identified with the proverbs and folk belief, for all of them should consist of short oral sentences and be performed by words in practice. Respectively, it is said that they are “the linguistic folklore to describe various b...
Usually the riddles are identified with the proverbs and folk belief, for all of them should consist of short oral sentences and be performed by words in practice. Respectively, it is said that they are “the linguistic folklore to describe various behaviors in common life”, “apt to be rather short sentence than long one” and “performed in context as well as by itself”, and that they are “not immutable and fixed, but changable and variable in context”.
But these three oral forms are distinguished from one another, in that each of them would be performed in different context. The proverbs are performed for ‘the convenience of communication in reality’, the folk belief for ‘an interpretation and response to certain event’, the riddles for ‘just its amusement’. Thus we can say that they belong to their own genre. As the riddles, especially, are performed for its amusement, the space-time of its performing is divided with the reality than the others do. For such quality the riddles are able to disapprove the authority and break the rule ; it is the very distortion of reality.
The riddles are basically communicated by fabricating the linguistic dimension. There are three cases ; the fabrication of message, of code and of context. The fist case is related with ‘the paradoxical use of words’, the second ‘the ambiguity of language’ and the third ‘the use of message that fabricates the context’.