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Proverbs as a crystallization of human wisdom, is a national cultural treasure. It is an indispensable part of a variety of languages. Despite the structural stability is an important feature, but in the actual language applications the proverbs variation is widespread. Specifically, it is generally believed that the English proverb is a fixed sentence, it is a very important feature is in use can not be altered, any component of which can not be replaced, increase or decrease. It has the form of conventional, structure fixability, Semantic opacity resistance (Moon, 1998). Therefore, from a formal point of view, the proverb is generally fixed, that is, they do not allow any changes. However, the in the proverbial actual use of the process of language users based on communicative need some proverbs the multifaceted operation or conversion (such as substitution, deletion, expansion, antisense, as well as the location of the replacement, etc.), proverb variants linguistic phenomenon, so that the language used to render the atmosphere, express thoughts and feelings, and to highlight the effect of a certain concept or humor. The main objective of this paper is the help of real corpus of contemporary American English Corpus COCA investigate a variant of English proverbs phenomenon. On the one hand, on the English proverb types of variants, we focused on the following changes: replacement, expansion, deletion, antisense and reversed. The the COCA corpus retrieval of word frequency analysis of the use of the prototype proverbs and variants in the actual situation, come to replace, deletion, expansion of the main types of the majority of proverbs variants. And compare word frequency change of the prototype proverbs and sayings variants obtained 90% of the prototype proverb variant form. Language users in accordance with the needs of the locale of flexibility in the use of proverbs English proverbs, there have been more and more variants phenomenon. On the other hand, through the framework of the theory of cognitive linguistics as well as the associated prototype and category theory as the basis to explain the cognitive nature of the variants of English proverbs. The paper is divided into five parts: The first chapter is the introductory section. The study of this part of the article, research objectives, research methods and organizational structure of the article is introduced. The second chapter is the literature review section. This chapter is primarily from four parts to elaborate. First introduces the definitions, characteristics, and functions of English proverbs; Secondly, described the relationship between proverbs and variants, defined the meaning of the of English proverbs variant in this article; once again, on the English proverbs its variants in the domestic and international The studies were reviewed; Finally, COCA corpus used in the development of corpus linguistics and text a brief introduction. The third chapter details the research methodology used in this article. Including research questions, study, data collection and analysis process. Chapter IV of the article the main part. By means of corpus research to define the types and distribution of proverbs variant analysis prototype proverbs and the frequency of use of the variant, its the cognitive rationale variants were analyzed and discussed. The fifth chapter is the conclusion part. This section of the paper summarized, pointed out that the study found that due to the limited time and conditions, the conclusions of this study are not mature enough to be more in-depth studies are needed to further demonstrate
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