CONDITIONAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN PROVERBS
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Abstract
This study starts from two fundamental research questions: in what ways conditionality is expressed in proverbs, and how a generic interpretation is actualized in conditional constructions within proverbs. The study has been conducted on a limited corpus of Portuguese and Croatian proverbs excerpted from several collections of proverbs and sayings, with primary interest in their semantic-syntactic structure rather than their lexical or possibly figurative meaning. We focus on the relationships among propositions in proverbs with a binary structure, guided by the criterion that they are connected by some type of conditional relation. Since both genericity and conditionality are not only linguistic, but also logical and conceptual universals, we expect that a comparative analysis, in this context, will reveal a certain degree of correspondence between Portuguese and Croatian proverbial texts. Our analysis of the corpus will focus on the following research questions: a) what types of conditional constructions are the proverbs based on; b) which verb forms are used in the proverbs to express different degrees of hypotheticality, c) what syntactic features characterize non-canonical conditional constructions in the proverbs. We believe that such type of analysis can contribute, as well, to a better understanding of the actualization of generic information at the linguistic level.
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