SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES IN IRISH-LANGUAGE PROVERBS
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Abstract
In recent years, linguistic studies into the concept of ‘proverbiality’ have provided paremiologists with a more comprehensive under-standing of the form and function of proverbial markers in a wide range of languages. Unfortunately, the Irish language has, until now, not featured in any of these linguistic analyses. This paper seeks to re-address this imbalance and to bring the unique structure and style of Irish-language proverbs to the attention of the international community of paremiologists for the first time. This research study applies the general methodology adopted by such scholars as Mahgoub (1948), Silverman-Weinreich (1978) and Arora (1984), to a corpus sample of Irish proverbs and provides both a qualitative and quantitative account of the most salient syntactic structures contained in Irish-language proverbs. Proverbial patterns as well as the collocation of proverbial markers are also discussed.
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