Proverbs in everyday speech versus frozen proverbs in dictionaries and texts: a corpus-based study
Résumé
When proverbs are used in everyday speech, speakers tend to reproduce them with the same lexical and morphosyntactic structure and apply them to the same situations and contexts. The aim of this paper is to highlight the differences between proverbs when used popularly in speech and their actual form and meaning in proverb dictionaries, collections or compilations, diachronic and synchronic corpora, literary quotations and the daily press. Our research focuses on a small selection of traditional Spanish proverbs collected in Andalusia, southern Spain. The selection includes, among others, the following proverbs: (a) No es señora quien lo es, sino quien lo sabe ser. [A lady is not she who is a lady but she who knows how to be one.] (b) No se puede luchar contra el destino, el que nace lechón muere cochino. [One cannot fight against destiny, he who is born a piglet dies a pig.] (c) Tiene el mal del milano, las patas malas y el pico sano. [He is like the sick kite, bad legs and a healthy beak.] Sometimes proverbs are adapted according to the speaker and thus the canonical señor (gentleman) becomes señora (lady) as in (a). Other times, speakers add an extension to a single-sentence proverb which functions as a sort of down-to-earth rhymed illustration, as seen in the first part of (b). However, and most often, lexical synonymic or hyponymic substitution is to be found, as shown in (c) where patas malas (bad legs) is used instead of alas quebradas (broken wings) and pico (beak) is used instead of papo (crop)/ Preliminary results demonstrate that proverbs are not frozen or immutable multi-words units kept in dusty boxes in old museums but that they take a new life when used by speakers in everyday situations. Further research that would use the same methodological approach could serve the purpose of updating, or at least completing, the data found in dictionaries and proverb collections.
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