Resumen de A corpus study of Italian proverbs: implications for lexicographical description
In this paper we look at the way in which proverbs were found to behave in a corpus of contemporary written Italian. We comment especially on the types of formal variation they were found to undergo, whether in terms of alternative citation forms or context related changes. We also comment on the more significant relationships between variation and textual function. Our findings would suggest that proverbs are far from being invariable units, and that lexicographical description of proverbs could be more complete than it usually is, especially as regards formal variation and syntactic flexibility. We acknowledge the need to compare our findings with data regarding proverb usage in the spoken language, and also the size limitations of the corpus used in the present study.
