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Kwon, Iksoo. 2012. Construing Korean Proverb 'Arms Bend Inward' through Property Selection Processes. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-3, 481-500. Proverbs assert their veracity about social and moral matters by linking features of generic social situations to mundane and individual human affairs. This paper focuses on the generic-to-specific mapping in the construal, exploring how a generic statement such as a proverb is used and understood in a relevant specific context. Particularly, this paper aims to revisit Lakoff and Turner’s (1989) model, GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metaphor and to show that the model itself does not fully explicate which properties of the source domain are picked and mapped onto their counterparts in the target domain. Rather, it merely provides a pool of relevant inferences and entailments for the generic statement. This paper argues that property selection process (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 1997) enables us to transparently explain the processes of construing a proverb; if we are able to characterize the domain of experience that constitutes the source domain in terms of selection processes, it will constrain the semantic extensions that occur in the corresponding target domain. This paper analyzes the Korean proverb phalun anulo kwupnunta ‘arms bend inward,’ roughly equivalent to saying in English, charity begins at home, as a case study and shows that the selection process helps to provide motivated accounts of how proverbs are construed. (University of California at Berkeley)