Abstract:
A proverb involves a set of operations that make it a linguistic and a cognitive, ontological, cultural and pragmatic phenomenon. In a discourse, proverbs and sayings function as verbal stereotypes: they are “ready-made” discourse units that reproduce, depending on the emitter’s intention and on the link with the message communicated. There are antonymic structures at paremiological level; thus, we identified different implicit and explicit proverbial contrasting structures that we gathered under the label “paremiological antonyms” (PrmA); we then distinguished two main types of PrmA: inter-paremiological antonyms and intra-paremiological antonyms. We exemplified on a Russian and Romanian corpus. PrmA are the most vivid example of the (co)existence of antonyms proper and occasional at phrase, contextual level.
