Sententious Sayings: A Linguistic Phenomenon

Authors

  • Jean Claude Anscombre
Keywords: paremiology, proverb, sententious sayings, evidentiality, genericity, metrics

Abstract

This work starts from a critical examination of the traditional view point about paremies and sententious forms. They are generally considered as manifestations of an ordinary and vulgar way of speaking, lacking in linguistic resources and fairly remote from logical reasoning. Seen as a folkloric phenomenon, sayings have always been excluded from linguistic studies and ascribed to ethnology and to stylistics, just as popular tales are. After criticizing the oft-recurring claims about the nature of sayings, this work aims at establishing on the base of properties and criteria that the paremic phenomena are basically linguistic ones, and involved three parameters: a) An evidential parameter (there are evidential markers specific to sayings); b) A generic parameter (there are specific parameters concerning time and aspect); c) A lexical parameter (there are specific syntactical and metrical parameters). Finally, several suggestions are made in order to define subclasses of sayings.

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How to Cite
Anscombre, J. C. (2010). Sententious Sayings: A Linguistic Phenomenon. Journal of Linguistic Research, 13, 17–43. Retrieved from https://revistas.um.es/ril/article/view/114111
Issue
Vol. 13 (2010): Más de ciencia del texto
Section
Monograph

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