Lexical and Semantic Aspects of Proverbs

František Cermák is professor emeritus of Charles University and member of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He co-founded and for many years directed the Institute of the Czech National Corpus.

• Introduction: Linguistic Aspects of Proverbs in System and Text –––– 7 A. Aspects of Proverbs: Lexical, Semantic and Pragmatic –––– 9 1. Lexical Foundations of Proverbs: Based on Data from English, German, French and Czech –––– 11 2. Lexicon and Proverbs: Basics and Foundations (Lexical Origins of Proverbs) –––– 25 3. Frequent Proverbs and Their Meaning: A Proposal of a Linguistic Description (The Core and Paremiological Minima Described) –––– 35 4. Proverbs: Linguistic and Lexicographic Approaches versus Ethnographic, Logical, Onomasiological and Other –––– 66 B. Proverb Use and Pragmatics –––– 77 5. What One Can Do with Proverbs in Text –––– 79 6. Text Introducers of Proverbs and Other Idioms –––– 94 7. Usage of Proverbs in Today’s Czech language: What Czech National Corpus Seems to Suggest –––– 111 8. Pragmatics of Proverbs: Basic Types of Evaluation –––– 127 C. Lexical and Proverb Classes in Lexicon –––– 135 9. Propositional Idioms –––– 137 10. Basic English Proverbs: Their Variability and Corpus-Based-Aspects –––– 146 11. Paremiological Minimum of English –––– 162 12. Paremiological Minimum of Czech: The Corpus Evidence –––– 170 D. Semantic and Functional Types and Classes of Proverbs –––– 185 13. Wisdom in Proverbs? (Do Proverbs Suggest Wisdom?) –––– 187 14. Proverbs on Friends and Friendship –––– 192 15. Reason and Thought: Pillars of Intelligent Behaviour Found in Proverbs –––– 205 16. Laugh Proverbs: Do These Really Capture Laughing? –––– 217 17. Numbers in Proverbs –––– 225 18. Dog and Cat Proverbs: Comparison of English, Czech, Finnish and Other Languages –––– 233 Ten Commandments for Paremiologist or A Paremiological Decalogue –––– 242