Asunción Salvador-Rabaza Ramos

Universitat de València

LOGICAL SEMANTIC STRUCTURES OF PROVERBS

Proverbial wisdom says that "actions speak louder than words", although in the case of proverbs we can observe that the words that are contained in them speak louder than actions, because of their particular linguistic structures that make them to be easily memorised for oral transmission in order to be used with argumentative functions in communicative processes. In this study we are going to focus attention on the proverbs from the N. Town Corpus Christi Play in order to exemplify their different types of fossilised linguistic partial structures that derive from quadripartite structures in which they express their ideas through logical propositions and give the argumentative emphasis that speakers want to express.