ON THE RELATIONSHIPS OF THE RHETORICAL, MODAL, LOGICAL, AND SYNTACTIC PLANES IN ESTONIAN PROVERBS

• Main Author: Arvo Krikmann
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: karelians
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.491.6758; http://folklore.ee/folklore/vol8/pdf/syntmod2.pdf

The clearest and most effective indicators of the stereotypicality of proverbs are not, however, the basic formulae of logic and degrees of modality or the basic patterns of semantic transformations or other similar constructs, but rather syntactic clichés with their more or less clear correlations with stereotypes occurring on other lev-els. Similarly, the well-known formula-like, or ornamental character of proverbs which has led some scholars to believe that it is possi-ble to subject proverbs to a logical description, manifests itself first and foremost as syntactic symmetry (in Estonian inevitably ac-companied by morphological symmetry). In the proverbs of Baltic-Finnic peoples (Finns, Karelians, Estonians, Votes) whose fond-ness of the so-called ‘runic verse ’ can be observed in a considerable part of their “metric ” folklore in several genres, structural symme-try is particularly frequent and pure, especially as compared to