Proverbs

[Benjamin Lyngfelt]

To some extent, proverbs are included in better dictionaries. Only to some extent, though, and I have no idea how many languages have dictionaries with that kind of information. Also, the proverbs aren't always easy to find, since they have to sort under specific word entries. E-dictionaries and constructicons offer other possibilities, but they are'nt very well developed yet – and exist for even fewer languages, I would guess.

It's not always self evident which kinds of linguistic information should be covered where: reference grammars or dictionaries. Preferably, there should be some overlap, but many kinds of linguistic phenomena are considered peripheral from both perspectives – and, hence, have tended to be neglected. For a few languages, there are now constructicons being developed, resources focusing on linguistic patterns that are too specific to be considered general rules but too general to be tied to specific words. However, proverbs aren't covered in those either, at least not yet.

In any case, in order to deal with the problem of achieving better coverage – of proverbs and lots of other stuff – grammarians and lexicographers should talk more to each other.

/Ben

________________________________________
Från: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] för Bernd Heine [heine39 at gmail.com]
Skickat: den 13 november 2012 06:31
Till: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
Ämne: [FUNKNET] Proverbs

Looking through a range of grammars of languages across the world I am
surprised that proverbs are largely or entirely ignored in grammatical
descriptions. They appear occasionally in the exemplification of
structures but are essentially never discussed, e.g., as a discourse
type, or as illustrating a special kind of morphosyntactic structure or
relationship between form and meaning.
To be sure, I could think of a number of reasons for that, but I find
none of them entirely convincing. Why should proverbs not have a place
in a (comprehensive) reference grammar? After all, they appear to occur
in all languages that have been appropriately documented, and they are
part of the knowledge speakers have about their language. Please advise.
Bernd