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How Proverbs Mean
Semantic Studies in English Proverbs
Neal R. Norrick
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This research monograph on how proverbs mean in texts and as texts explores their semantic possibilities in conversation, drama and the press, where they offer preformed structural units for expanded passages, and nondirect speech acts which unfold didactic force.
A definition of the proverb incorporating recent insights of text and system linguistics is offered.
The problem of developing syntactic and semantic analyses for radically elliptical, formulaic and archaic/lectal proverbs is addressed and a special p-grammar with methods of regularization and instructions for interpretation of syntactically anomalous proverbs is proposed.
The discovery of a small number of recurrent proverb figures not only provides a taxonomy of meaning structures in proverbs and related texts, but also reveals prototypical associative patterns generally. Finally, semantic relations of sameness, implication and oppositeness between inventorized proverbs are investigated. |
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