Volume 38, Issue 1
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Abstract

How do speakers tease apart a simple generic sentence (les instituteurs ne gagnent pas beaucoup d’argent “school teachers do not make much money”) and a proverb (les cordonniers sont les plus mal chaussés, “shoemakers are always the worst shod”, eng. The cobbler’s children go barefoot)? From a formal viewpoint, these two utterance types are very close. Yet, only the latter is used in fields other than shoemaking. I account for this property, which I call ‘transposability’, by means of the following hypothesis, which also applies to proverbs and semantically transparent fixed expressions: a proverb correspond to a semantic form that consisting of a few semantic features organized as a semantic network. I adopt Sowa’s (1984) formalism and represent this network as a semic molecule (Rastier, 1989). To explain the transposability of the molecule, I use a notion from Gestaltheorie, namely the ‘strong form’. A proverb is freely transposable providing it lexicalizes a strong form, the strong form being a molecule with a high degree of internal coherence. Semantically speaking, I show that this coherence is a factor of both (a) an inherent or socially normed relational architecture and (b) an articulation without rests.

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/content/journals/10.1075/li.38.1.02gre
2015-01-01
2024-03-29
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http://instance.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journals/10.1075/li.38.1.02gre
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Keyword(s): articulation without remainders; articulation without rests; conceptual structure; gestalttheorie; good/strong form; linguistic paremiology; metaphor; paratopy; predicate-argument structure; proverb; saying; semantics; variants

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