IN SEARCH OF PROVERBIALITY “THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL” CONSTRUCTION IN ROMANIAN

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Veröffentlicht: Jul 26, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29162/pv.43.1.1173
Ausgabe
Bd. 43 Nr. 1 (2026): Proverbium
200-234
Copyright (c) 2026 Author(s)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Autor/innen-Biografie

Ioan Milică

Faculty of Letters, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași

Mihai Eminescu Central University Library

Str. Păcurari, nr. 4, Iași, 700511, România

Hauptsächlicher Artikelinhalt

Ioan Milică
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7226-6946

Abstract

The paper examines the Romanian construction A este X tuturor Y ‘A is the X of all Y’, as in Iubirea de arginți e rădăcina tuturor relelor ‘The love of money is the source of all evils’, from a corpus-based and probabilistic perspective on proverbiality. The study approaches the construction and its contextual instantiations as a productive network whose proverbial identity emerges from evaluative force, collocational strength and distributional constraint. Drawing on a small, curated corpus of 81 attestations spanning 1581 to 2008, the analysis describes and interprets the contextual syntagmatic dynamics across the three constructional slots (A, X, Y). The results show clear asymmetries: the A-slot allows controlled variation, while the X and Y slots display high degrees of lexical constraint and collocational convergence. The discussion maps the corpus findings onto a multidimensional model of proverbiality, addressing traditionality, stability, evaluativity, generality, grounding, symbolicity, and transferability. The study suggests that proverbiality is a probabilistic effect arising from recurrent structural alignment, semantic constraint and cultural reuse over time.
 

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Zitationsvorschlag
Milică, I. „IN SEARCH OF PROVERBIALITY: “THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL” CONSTRUCTION IN ROMANIAN“. Proverbium, Bd. 43, Nr. 1, Juli 2026, S. 200-234, doi:10.29162/pv.43.1.1173.

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