Introduction to Paremiology

Hrisztalina Hrisztova-Gotthardt, Melita Aleksa Varga

• Publisher: De Gruyter Open Poland
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110456127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This handbook introduces key elements of the philological research area called paremiology (the study of proverbs). It presents the main subject area as well as the current status of paremiological research. The basic notions, among others, include defining proverbs, main proverb features, origin, collecting and categorization of proverbs. Each chapter is written by a leading scholar-specialist in their area of proverbial research. Since the book represents a measured balance between the popular and scientific approach, it is recommended to a wide readership including experienced and budding scholars, students of linguistics, as well as other professionals interested in the study of proverbs.

Neal R. Norrick

1 Subject Area, Terminology, Proverb Definitions, Proverb Features

1.1 The Subject Area of Paremiology

The linguistic units called proverbs in a culture constitute a diverse, organically developed and developing collection of certain recurrent sayings from the discourses of a language community. Lexica and anthologies can mislead us into thinking there are some fixed, homogenous groups of items called proverbs – as opposed to an adhoc grouping of recurrent sayings. There is no a priori reason to expect the proverbs of a community to constitute a coherent syntactic type or to express a consistent set of propositions. We should not expect to discover a single characteristic proverbiality or a single inclusive definition of the proverb, and we should not be surprised when isolated proverbs contradict each other. Hence Taylor’s (1962) famous remark that the definition of the proverb is too difficult to reward the effort.

What we generally call proverbs are traditional, pithy, often formulaic and/or figurative, fairly stable and generally recognizable units. Proverbs are characteristically used to form a complete utterance, make a complete conversational contribution and/or to perform a speech act in a speech event. This differentiates them from non-sentential items like proverbial phrases, idioms, binomials etc. Proverbs make apodictic (expressed as undeniable truth) statements like Money talks or they evoke a scenario applicable to a range of analogous situations, as in Little strokes fell great oaks. In supplying ready-made responses to recurrent types of situations, proverbs seem to suggest particular evaluations or courses of action.

Proverbs can be collected and anthologized as little texts complete in themselves; they can be described in their relations to other proverbs, in their discourse contexts and within their cultural matrix. For folklorists, proverbs exist as items of folklore alongside riddles, proverbial phrases and jokes. They provide highly recognizable, (relatively) fixed textual building blocks with unique rhetorical potential. Proverbs are valued as folk wisdom and bearers of traditional lore. Their cultural salience renders proverbs interesting in cross-cultural comparison as well, including questions of intercultural transmission and translation. For linguists, proverbs unite features of the lexeme, sentence, set phrase, collocation, text and quote. They illustrate interesting patterns of prosody, parallelism, syntax, lexis and imagery. Because of their imagery, proverbs provide evidence of stereotypes and standard cultural metaphors. These properties further make proverbs valuable in psycholinguistic testing. Proverb variation by text and by speech community raises interesting issues as well. Recent advances in corpus linguistics have established patterns of proverb use as statistical facts rather than educated guesses. Corpus investigations show that proverbs are rare and often manipulated in contexts where they appear, but they nevertheless remain recognizable due to their cultural salience. For lexicographers, proverbs are items to be collected, categorized and catalogued with information on their origins and distribution along with appropriate links to other proverbs, proverbial phrases, idioms and so on within and across linguistic communities. Thus, proverbs have been studied from a range of perspectives for various reasons, and the diverse research traditions have produced a breadth of differing terminologies, which require description and comparison.

1.2 Terminology

Proverbs have repeatedly been characterized as self-contained, traditional units with didactic content and fixed, poetic form, whereby all these characterizations have been cast in varying terminologies with various nuances and connotations. Folklorists have been concerned with setting proverbs proper off from the proverbial phrases, proverbial comparisons, superstitions, wellerisms, clichés and idioms. At the same time, linguists have sought to define the proverb with terms such as sentence, clause, idiom, and conversational turn among others. In the following, the standard terms will be investigated and compared before turning to the matter of definition as such.

1.2.1 The Proverb and Its Kin

The proverb is a traditional figurative saying which can form a complete utterance on its own. Its ability to constitute a complete utterance distinguishes the proverb proper from another traditional, characteristically figurative form, the proverbial phrase, which cannot stand on its own, for example to kick over the traces, which lacks a subject. The linguistic term idiom is often applied to proverbial phrases with figurative meanings. A special sort of proverbial phrase is the proverbial comparison (or proverbial simile) with as, like or than, for example as brown as a berry, like a house afire and older than the hills. The maxim and the cliché are like the proverb in forming a complete utterance, but they lack its traditionality and imagery: Whereas the maxim states a rule for conduct as in Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today, the cliché expresses a trite observation as in When you’re hot, you’re hot. The slogan is a non-traditional form created to promote a product or idea as in Nike’s advertising slogan Just do it or Obama’s campaign slogan Yes, we can. Non-traditional sayings in general usage but perhaps associated with particular sources such as Greek mythology for Pandora’s box or historical persons as for Martin Luther King’s I have a dream are called winged words. There are also aphorisms, literary forms like the proverb in its straightforward memorable formulation as in Art is long, life short. Winged words and aphorisms merge into the stock of allusions to well-known texts and writers such as All the world’s a stage from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Apart from that a binominal is a linguistic term for formulaic phrases consisting of two parallel words connected by and or occasionally or, including proverbs such as Live and learn and Sink or swim. The wellerism, which derives its name from the character Sam Weller in Charles Dickens’ novel The Pickwick Papers, is another traditional item which extends a proverb or a cliché, playfully assigning it to a speaker as in It won’t be long now, as the monkey said when he backed his tail into a fan. Superstitions are traditional beliefs without any fixed expression, e.g. that breaking a mirror brings seven years of bad luck. Although, these definitions and distinctions seem rough-and-ready, they provide an initial working basis, the more precise parameters of which such as self-containedness and traditionality will be examined in the paragraphs to come.

1.2.2 Self-containedness

According to Seiler (1922), proverbs must be self-contained sayings (in sich geschlossene Sprüche), by which he means that none of their essential syntactic units may be replaced. Seiler introduces this criterion to distinguish proverbs from proverbial phrases: it excludes proverbial phrases like to face the music and smooth as silk, because they lack syntactic units essential to render them complete clauses, and these can be linked to them at will, as in you have to face the music and hair smooth as silk.

Milner (1969a) and Barley (1972) come quite close to Seiler’s self-containedness when they identify proverbs with statements. Abrahams (1972) is perhaps more precise in requiring that a proverb be a full statement, and Dundes (1975) proposes the even more precise propositional statement. Now, Abraham and Dundes seem to mean that the proverb must be co-extensive with a logical proposition, i.e. one unit consisting of a subject and predicate. An initial objection to this criterion is that it fails to correspond to natural conversational conventions, which have little to do with formal logical conventions (Abercrombie, 1965; Crystal & Davy, 1969). Second, all five writers cited apparently intend their criteria to apply to some deeper, semantic level underlying the surface structure of proverbs, since proverb surface structures routinely consist of pure predicates without arguments, as in Forewarned, forearmed or Live and let live. But without a complete semantic analysis and a theory of proverb deep structures, such features provide no firm basis for definition.

Moreover, even presupposing deep structure semantic analyses for the proverbs in question, the logical proposition or statement can only serve as a lower boundary on proverb structure, since proverbs commonly contain more than a single proposition-like unit, as in e.g. Marry in haste and repent at leisure. As characteristically conversational units, proverbs are more appropriately described in terms of the structure of conversation, say that of a complete conversational turn syntactically independent of surrounding discourse (Norrick, 1985).

Paremiologists have also had recourse to the syntactic notion of the sentence. Taylor (1934) determines tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of contributing authors
• Introduction
• 1 Subject Area, Terminology, Proverb Definitions, Proverb Features
• 2 Origin of Proverbs
• 3 Categorization of Proverbs
• 4 Semiotic and Semantic Aspects of the Proverb
• 5 Structural Aspects of Proverbs
• 6 Pragmatic and Stylistic Aspects of Proverbs
• 7 Cognitive Apects of Proverbs 81
• 8 Empirical Research and Paremiological Minimum
• 9 Proverbs from a Corpus Linguistic Point of View
• 10 Paremiography: Proverb Collections
• 11 Contrastive Study of Proverbs
• 12 Proverbs in Literature
• 13 Proverbs in Mass Media
• 14 Proverbs and Foreign Language Teaching
• 15 Anti-proverbs
• Glossary
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Index
• Backcover