Proverbs

[Geoffrey Steven Nathan]

My colleague Ljiljana Progovac led a research group here at Wayne State that spent considerable time looking at (and taking seriously the syntax of) non-sententials, including proverbs. The result of their study (which I did not take part in, other than to attend the conference at the end) was the following volume: 

Progovac, L. & et al. (eds) 2006. The Syntax of Nonsententials: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Linguistik aktuell = 93). Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins. 

There might be some useful information therein. 

Geoffrey S. Nathan 
Faculty Liaison, C&IT 
and Professor, Linguistics Program 
http://blogs.wayne.edu/proftech/ 
+1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT) 

----- Original Message -----

> From: "Bernd Heine" <heine39 at gmail.com>
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2012 12:31:54 AM
> Subject: [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