Contenu du sommaire : La parole proverbiale, sous la direction de Jean-Claude Anscombre

This study is an attempt to define the proverbial speaking from the point of view or its linguistic properties, mainly the metrical ones. It has been noticed at length that proverbial items often show rimes, assonances and alliterations. It is shown here that these phonological and prosodie features moreover reveal metrical and rhythmical patterns that can also be found in some poetic forms, as well as in nursery rhymes and slogans.

This article shows an application of the lexico-grammatical model built up by Maurice Gross and his team at LADL to the study of proverbs. Our starting principle is that a rigorous methodology and a system of classification are vital elements to the description of proverbs. This research intends to provide a theoretical and applied linguistic contribution to the comparative study of French and Italian proverbs. Tools such as electronic dictionaries and libraries of finite state automata have been built up, and can be used both for theoretical analysis and in practical applications. For example in fast retrieval of proverbs from a wide corpus of textual data, translation, recording of variants, and storage of citations. The aim of this study is the comparison of certain classes of French and Italian proverbs. These classes are examined with emphasis on the correlation between them.

Georges Kleiber (Universite de Strasbourg) : On the Semantics of Proverbs Is there any hope of building an adequate semantics for proverbs ? The aim of this paper is to give a positive answer to this question. It is indeed possible to define what a proverb is, semantically speaking. Our characterization lies on two basic claims. The first is that a proverb has the status of a sentential denomination with generic import. The second shows that his semantic structure always conveys an implication which relies two situations involving humans. We can thus predict the constraints which must be satisfied by a generic sentence to become a proverb and, at the same time, explain the metaphorical character of certain proverbs and also the synecdochic mechanism in other proverbs.

.Silvia Palma (Universite de Reims) : The Negation in Proverbs In this article, proverbs are considered from a purely linguistic point of view, and within the frame of the theory of argumentation in language (Anscombre & Ducrot) and the theory of topoi (Anscombre eds, 1995). As linguistic items close to names, proverbs can qualify a situation through a stereotypical frame. The situation will then be considered as a representative (or not representative) case of the stereotype involved in the proverb. The article focuses on negative proverbs that show a negation because of their rich enunciative structure (negation being a preeminently polyphonic context). We finally suggest, for the proverbs with a negation, a classification mainly based on their enunciative structure.

Laurent Perrin (Universite de Geneve) : Some Remarks on the Generic and Denominative Status of Proverbs Based on Kleiber's (1989) hypothesis, according to which proverbs are denominations referring to generic situations, this article supports the idea that proverbs have in fact a double dimension, in that they are both generic and idiomatic, that is, denominative sentences; proverbs simultaneously affirm general truths and, through their idiomatic or sententious form, denominate a generic situation that is relative to a multitude of identical preliminary affirmations. Such a conception of proverbs leads us to the question of the lexicalization of rhetorical acts, especially metaphors.

Charloffe Schapira (Universite de Haifa) : Proverb, Proverbialization and De-proverbialization The purpose of this article is to determine the characteristics required for a sentence to become a proverb, including the linguistic process through which this is achieved, and the conditions that secures the survival of the formula through the ages. The "deproverbialization" of the proverb - that is the occurrences in discourse in which the formula happens to loose its paremiologic status - is also considered and discussed.

Julia Sevilla Muňoz (Universidad Complutense of Madrid, Spain, and Review Paremia) : French proverbs and proverbial sentences, and their Spanish equivalent One of the main problems in compared Paremiology is to get a paremiological equivalent in order to analyze the paremias in different languages. The aim of this article is to provide a sample collection of French and Spanish common paremias, after a short account of the linguistic criteria (morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic) that are considered by the author to work out, especially as far as proverbs and proverb-like forms are concerned.

Linguistic approaches of proverbs lack clear definition as well as reliable corpus, being widely dependent on an intuitive idea of proverbs. So we first try to shed light on the common notion of proverb nowadays through the study of the most current collocations involving the words proverb and proverbial. Then it is shown how linguistic descriptions of proverbial meaning cannot be founded upon such widespread ideas and keep mixing up formal and semantic features of the litteral proverbial formulation with those of the usual associated gloss. From this point of view, some previous propositions or obvious statements about the status of "denomination", generic sentence and lexical meaning of proverbs reveal to be illusory and then require new investigations.