5 Structural Aspects of Proverbs

Abstract

The challenge of defining the proverb is one that has defied the will, patience, and intellect of scholars for millenia– from Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and other classical scholars, to more recent pioneers in the field, such as Archer Taylor, Bartlett Jere Whiting, Lutz Röhrich, and Wolfgang Mieder. Attempts at providing a definition have yielded varied results, but Taylor's (1962: 3) now infamous quotation still holds rela-tively true: " An incomunicable quality tells us this sentence is proverbial and that one is not. Hence no definition will enable us to identify positively a sentence as pro-verbial. " This quotation is important, I believe, not for the acknowledgment that a finite definition isn't possible – as a " proverb is not a species with its genus proximum and its differentia specifica as in a systemised science " (Guershoon, 1941: 15) – but because Taylor first raised the question of " an incommunicable quality " . In recent years, scholars have begun to investigate this abstract concept by identifying certain poetic and structural features that appear frequently in proverbs and which consti-tute, in very broad terms, the concept of proverbial style or what Shirley Arora (1984) has termed proverbiality. These devices are a veritable checklist for proverbial status: the more of these stylistic features a sentence possesses, the higher the level of pro-verbiality, and the greater the probability that the sentence is, or will be identified, as a proverb.39 The phonological, semantic, and syntactic devices that occur frequently in prov-erbs across languages may be termed proverbial markers. These internal and external makers are warning signs that indicate that a particular sentence is deviant from the surrounding discourse, in that it exhibits stylistic and structural adornments that are not typically found in naturally-occuring language. Furthermore, from a pragmatic perspective, it alerts the listener that the expression is important in some regard, be that in terms of its use, function, or meaning. Scholars have identified a range of devices which operate in ensemble to effect the concept of proverbial style, amongst which the most important are parallelism, ellipsis, alliteration, rhyme, metaphor, personification, paradox, and hyperbole (Mieder, 2004: 7). Structural elements are amongst the most universal and easily identifiable proverbial markers, and feature with high frequencies across world languages, both in terms of (i) the traditional fixed 39 " It stands to reason that the more markers a given saying possesses, the greater its chances of being perceived as a proverb at initial hearing; and conversely, a genuinely traditional but unmarked saying may well fail as a proverb the first time it is heard, merely because the listener does not recog-nise it as such. " (Arora 1984: 13)