VI Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2014

Communicative PU embrace set expression that have a formal sentence they are not partially predicative form i.e. «Ships that pass in the night» or «Strike while the iron is hot»

Proverb entrances that a didactics sense and which organized from the point view of rhythm.

The proverb is always the sentence. It has a didactic sense (teaches, cautions and the other) Proverbs as often have the form of complex sentence. In the contacts they may have a form singly sentence or a part of complex one. For example, the proverb «The proof of the pudding is in the eating»

«You must not forget that there is still the possibility that the girl Cataline Perez was deceived. The proof of the pudding is in the eating» (W.S. Maugham).

They will tell you that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and they are right (G.B. Shaw).

Among well-known English proverbs there are those which are comparatively long, e.g. ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’; ‘he should have a long spoon that sups with the devil’, etc., nevertheless, the majority of them are rather short and laconic utterances.

From the examples mentioned above it is evident that ellipsis is more common for proverbs than for other phraseological units. Long proverbs consisting of more than ten words tend to become out of date and obsolete. Most of long proverbs registered in ‘Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs’ are obsolete, e.g. the proverb ‘measure thy cloth ten times, thou canst cut it but once’. Archaic words in a proverb make it obsolete. The proverb ‘he that hath had one of his family hanged may not say to his neighbor, hang up that fish’ has been ousted by the proverb with the same meaning but based on different images: ‘people who live in glass should not throw stones’.

The notion ‘saying’ is not clearly defined in modern folklore studies because it involves different structures and semantic types of non-motivated set-phrases. The only thing that is common for all those different word-combinations is that they are not sayings though their similarity in some cases does not have to be denied (should not be denied/ is quite evident).

In British and American linguistic literature no strict and clear borderline is drawn between proverbs and sayings. This accounts for the fact that English dictionaries of proverbs include phrases and utterances being not essentially proverbs.

In modern phraseology it seems to be inappropriate to use the term ‘saying’ in that broad sense as it is used in folklore studies. As various structural and semantic types of phraseological units have already been named, the term ‘saying’ can be applied only to one of them that has not been named yet, namely communicative phraseological units whether they are connected with proverbs or not. To sayings linguists traditionally refer those set-phrases that have been considered to be sayings since Dahl, i.e. for more than one hundred years. An extended interpretation of this term in linguistics seems to be ineffective.

Sayings as well as proverbs are sentences. However, these types of phraseological units are different from each other from the functional point of view. It is not peculiar for proverbs to have a directive, didactic and evaluative function. Proverbs are expressions of folk wisdom and they are more general and abstract than sayings.

It should be noted that proverbs with a high degree of motivation of their components belong to set-phrases of phrasemic character (‘all is well that end well’, ‘appearances are deceptive’, ‘better late than never’).

Proverbs are characterized by lexical stability and the stability of the order of the components that is connected with syntactic dependence and a great variety of expressive means used in proverbs.