Proverbial markers and their significance for linguistic proverb definitions: an experimental investigation

2.1 Proverb definitions

Proverbs are extremely complex PUs, and there are various structural, cultural, and usage-based characteristics that can be employed in a proverb definition. Definitions usually stress one or several factors while neglecting others, which results in proverb definitions generally either being too narrow or too general. The search for the “incommunicable quality” (Taylor 1931: 3) that proverbs possess is ongoing.

Three criteria that are often employed by paremiologists studying proverbs as bearers of culture are: (i) the fact that the proverb’s author is often unknown to most speakers in a speech community (Villers 2016: 377), (ii) that they are traditional (Arora 1984: 1; Mieder 2004: 4), and (iii) that they have didactic content (Norrick 1985: 41). All three criteria are difficult if not impossible to incorporate into a linguistic proverb definition for several reasons. If unknown authorship is a criterion that distinguishes proverbs from related forms such as quotes, a proverb would cease to be a proverb once its creator is identified.^[3] There are even proverbs such as German Wer zu spät kommt, den bestraft das Leben ‘He who is late is punished by life itself’ that exist as quotes and proverbs at the same time (Steyer 2012: 295). Traditionality, which is often described as a mixture of age and currency (Mieder 2004: 4), is also not suitable as a linguistic criterion as it is impossible to tell how old or current a proverb must be to count as one. Although many proverbs are old, new proverbs can be coined in an instant in the age of the internet and mass media, and are then perceived as proverbs by speakers. The notion of currency has its own problems, as will be addressed below. Finally, the ‘didactic’ content of proverbs is evident in proverbs such as Look before you leap. However, studies of contemporary proverb usage reveal that the proverb is losing its didactic function and serves nowadays more as an (ironic) comment (Burger 2012: 75). Therefore, didactic function is not a criterion that can be employed to predict the difference between proverbs and other PUs.

The most famous usage-based criterion used to define proverbs is currency, meaning that proverbs “appear with at least some frequency and distribution” (Mieder 2015: 44) in a speech community. While it is certainly true that many proverbs are widely known, it remains unclear how frequent a proverb must be used in order to be considered as current. Corpus studies reveal that the frequency of individual proverbs in a corpus can change radically depending on the search query used (Steyer 2012: 297–299). Proverbial variation and modification impede the determination of absolute frequency. Additionally, making currency a defining factor of proverbs means that old proverbs that are not used contemporarily would not be proverbs anymore. This indicates that there are structural aspects to a proverb that constitute its proverbiality that remain unchanged.

Besides these cultural and usage-based criteria, there are four structural criteria usually mentioned in proverb definitions. The first structural criterion that every proverb candidate must meet, and that was already pointed out in early linguistic proverb definitions, is that proverbs must be “self-contained” (Norrick 1981: 5). Proverbs must be sentences or sentence-equivalent utterances that can stand on their own, and this is essential for distinguishing proverbs and proverbial phrases (Burger 2012: 46).^[4] The fact that sentence equivalence also proves helpful while identifying proverbs in a corpus (Steyer 2012: 290–291) demonstrates that this criterion is indeed central if we want to make a distinction between proverbs and other PUs.

While sentence equivalence is a useful criterion for a linguistic proverb definition, other structural criteria are problematic in this respect. The “frozen internal structure” (Cram 1994 [1983]: 75) that has often been assumed for proverbs is questionable as there usually exist several regional variants of the same proverb.^[5] Recent paremiological research shows that proverbs can be strongly modified (Litovkina 2015; Mandziuk 2016).

Another criterion that could be helpful to a linguistic proverb definition but that turns out to be problematic is brevity. Brevity and pithiness are commonly accepted proverb characteristics (Röhrich and Mieder 1977: 3). Proverbs must be brief and concise so that they can be memorized by speakers. However, long proverbs do exist, and it is unclear where exactly brevity ends.^[6]

The last structural criterion to be discussed here is “poetic form” (Norrick 1981: 7). Many proverbs contain rhetorical devices as well as metaphorical language. However, not all proverbs feature metaphor or rhetorical devices, which leads many paremiologists to the conclusion that poetic form is optional. Poetic form is, of course, not restricted to proverbs and can also be found in slogans, quotes, and related forms, and thus can impede differentiation between these forms (Norrick 1981: 7). Nevertheless, every proverb seems to adhere to so-called “proverbial style” (Arora 1984: 9). Although the individual proverbial markers that a proverb contains differ, this fact cannot be neglected, and this makes it worthwhile investigating these factors of proverbiality further. In the next section, I present proverbial markers described in the literature.

2.2 Markers of proverbiality

Proverbial markers are well-researched, and the paremiological literature regards them as important for speakers’ ability to identify an utterance as proverbial (Mac Coinnigh 2015: 112; Arora 1984). A seminal study on the importance of proverbial markers for proverb perception is Arora (1984). Arora asked 46 speakers of Spanish to respond to a questionnaire containing 25 items, two of which were existing proverbs, while the rest of the items were invented proverbs containing different proverbial markers. Ninety-six percent of the study’s participants claimed to know No es oro todo lo que relumbra ‘Everything that glitters is not gold’, or stated that they did not know it but nonetheless considered it a proverb. Only 70% said the same of the less frequent proverb Más vale llegar a tiempo que ser convidado ‘It’s better to arrive on time than to be invited’. A total of 12 invented proverbs was rated higher than this ‘real’ proverb unknown to most Spanish speakers. Nine invented proverbs in Arora’s study were rated as (probably) proverbial by at least 75% of the participants, while three invented proverbs paraphrasing proverbial wisdom without containing any proverbial markers received the lowest ratings. Therefore, Arora’s results show the impact that proverbial markers can have on proverb perception.

In the next two sections, I present six classes of markers that are commonly accepted to be markers of proverbiality in the literature. I divide these six groups into syntactic and semantic factors, a distinction which mostly serves presentational purposes.

4.1 Experimental method

4.2 Results

The experimental data were analyzed using the statistics program R, version 3.6.1 (R Core Team). Table 1 gives an overview over the mean ratings for the five experimental conditions.

Comparing the means of the five different experimental groups reveals that the mean ratings for the old proverbs, the semantically marked invented proverbs, and the semantically and syntactically marked items are similar. This is not the case for the unmarked paraphrases. The syntactically marked items were not rated as low as the unmarked paraphrases, but also not as high as the remaining three experimental groups. Figure 1 shows the differences in ratings.

Fig. 1:

Boxplot comparing the mean ratings from the five experimental conditions

As a next step, comparisons of the means were necessary to analyze whether the differences between the five groups are statistically significant. I compared the five experimental groups using t-tests for independent samples. An exception to this procedure is the last comparison, the comparison between the group of semantically marked items and the group of semantically and syntactically marked items, for which I used a paired t-test.

The results clearly show that the differences between the mean ratings of the group of old proverbs and the group of semantically marked items are not significant (t(48) = 0.71424, p = 0.4785). The same holds for the differences between the old proverbs and the group of semantically and syntactically marked items (t(48) = −0.36852, p = 0.7141), and the semantically marked and the semantically as well as syntactically marked items (t(24) = −1.3248, p = 0.1977). The difference between the group of old proverbs and the syntactically marked items is an exception to this as it is marginally significant (t(48) = 1.6905, p = 0.09741). The t-test results therefore show a similar picture to what the boxplot in Fig. 1 shows as they highlight the similarity between the ratings for the old proverbs, the semantically marked items, the mixed items, as well as for the special status of the group of syntactically marked items.

In the next section, I discuss the implications of these results for my previously stated hypotheses and present a refinement of the theoretical proverb definition sketched in Section 3.

5.1 The impact of proverbial markers on proverb perception

The experiment’s results not only provide interesting insights into proverb perception in German, but also offer valuable conclusions about the structural nature of proverbs in general.

Hypothesis 1 can be verified as there is no statistically significant difference between the mean ratings for the invented proverbs with semantic and syntactic markers (M = 4.27, SD = 1.16) and the group of old proverbs (M = 4.14, SD = 1.29; t(48) = −0.36852, p = 0.7141). The difference between the mean ratings for the invented proverbs with semantic markers only (M = 3.88, SD = 1.28) and the old proverbs is also not significant (t(48) = 0.71424, p = 0.4785). We can conclude from this that semantic markers alone have a strong influence on proverb perception. Since the only semantic marker used in this experiment is metaphor, the results highlight the strong influence of metaphor on proverbiality. An additional syntactic marker does not seem to raise the proverbiality of an expression significantly. The difference between the mean ratings for the group of semantically marked items and the mixed group items (M = 4.27, SD = 1.16) is not significant (t(24) = −1.3248, p = 0.1977).

The group of syntactically marked items is in fact the hardest class of items to interpret. The difference between the mean ratings for the syntactically marked items (M = 3.53, SD = 1.29) and the old proverbs is marginally significant (t(48) = 1.6905, p = 0.09741); this is much lower than the p-values for the comparative analysis of the other categories. The effect of syntactic markers on proverb perception is possibly still there, but is much weaker than the effect of the semantic markers. Future research could focus on the influence of individual syntactic markers and compare them to each other. It would be especially interesting to explore whether proverbial formulae have a stronger effect on proverb perception than marked word order, whether there are differences between individual proverbial formulae, and what kind of role rhetorical devices play.

The fact that the difference between the semantically marked items and the mixed marked items is not significant indicates that Hypothesis 2 cannot be confirmed. Quality seems to be more important for proverb perception than quantity. Invented proverbs with semantic markers received similar ratings to old proverbs, and adding a syntactic marker to these proverbs did not change this general picture. Semantic markers alone are sufficient.

The falsification of the second hypothesis raises interesting questions concerning non-metaphorical proverbs, which are clearly also accepted as proverbs. Proverbs such as Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today live off an accumulation of syntactic markers and contain semantic markers such as the prototypical lexical inventory. In theory, it should therefore be possible that non-metaphorical proverbs and metaphorical proverbs are equally acceptable if the non-metaphorical proverb contains a sufficient number of other markers. Again, further research on the impact of syntactic markers would be desirable to learn more about the nature of non-metaphorical proverbs.

Hypothesis 3 can, as already mentioned, only be partially explored here. The data presented here still confirms that the influence of the individual proverbial markers is in fact unequal. The impact of metaphor is enormous, which is in line with observations previously made in the paremiological literature. The influence of syntactic markers is relatively weak in comparison with metaphor.

The weak impact of the syntactic markers used in my experiments can, however, only partially speak for all syntactic markers that are there. Other proverbial formulae than the ones used here as well as rhetorical devices could have stronger effects on proverb perception. The conclusion that syntactic markers are weaker than metaphor should not be arrived at too hastily, before syntactic markers are extensively researched in similar experiments. Additionally, the group of syntactic markers contains an outlier (M = 6.2), which is the sentence in (9), for which there seems to be no satisfactory explanation at present.^[17]

There are several possible explanations for the weak impact of proverbial formulae on proverb perception, one of them being that many of these formulae are not used exclusively for building proverbs. As Steyer (2012: 301) states, several of the patterns that serve as proverbial formulae are also more abstract structural patterns that are used for building other types of expressions. The same conclusion holds for marked word order, which is used for all kinds of (information-structural) purposes in daily speech and is not reserved for proverbs. It is likely that native speakers do not associate these syntactic markers with proverbial speech only.

Metaphorical speech is, of course, not only used in proverbs. Metaphor, however, provides a stronger deviation from the surrounding context than proverbial formulae or marked word order do. Metaphorical utterances must be metaphorically interpreted by the listener so that they can understand what the speaker wants to say and so they must identify the ‘out of context’-usage of the metaphorical image as a precondition to understanding the utterance.

A few words should be said about the two proverbial markers that I have not discussed so far: genericity and the prototypical lexical inventory. While inventing proverbs, it is impossible to eliminate these two markers from the experimental items. Both markers are needed if one wants to create even ‘unmarked’ paraphrases such as the ones I introduced here. It is not possible to avoid prototypical words such as tomorrow, always, and better while creating proverbs, and, analogically, it is impossible to prevent generic readings. I therefore assumed for the purpose of the experiment that these two markers are present in all experimental items as base markers, even in the unmarked paraphrases. Since the unmarked paraphrases still received very low ratings, I conclude that the two markers do not have much of an impact on proverb perception in German.

On the methodological side, my experiment highlights how fruitful Arora’s (1984) use of invented proverbs is in the investigation of proverb perception. Invented proverbs allow the experimenter to make sure that speakers do not rate a proverb based on whether they know it or not. The potential of the experimental design developed here based on Arora (1984) is not yet exhausted. It could be used to learn more about the nature of proverbs in the future, not only about proverb structure and individual proverbial markers, but possibly also about content and brevity constraints on proverbs.

6 Conclusion and outlook

Defining proverbs has always been, and remains, a challenging task. In this paper, I have proposed a marker-based definition of proverbs based on linguistic criteria. The definition introduced here is especially helpful if one wants to study proverbs from a linguistic perspective, but other paremiological disciplines could also benefit from the insights gained here. The empirical evidence presented in Section 4 shows that proverbiality is measurable and can be researched using experimental methods. The results also suggest that structural aspects of proverbs are in fact crucial to proverb perception. Proverbial markers are therefore neither optional, nor should they be neglected in proverb definitions in general. Paremiological prominence can be embedded into an overall proverb definition, as the analysis in Section 3 shows.

On a methodological level, the experimental design introduced here could be used as a blueprint in future research to learn more about proverb perception and the importance of individual proverbial markers. Apart from structural aspects, extensions and adaptations of this design could be used to further explore the perception of proverb content and possibly answer the question of how brief or concise a proverb ideally should be. Embedding experimental items into different contexts of usage could reveal more about the contexts in which proverbial speech is most often used by native speakers and/or is most acceptable, and could allow us to learn more about proverbs as speech acts. This way, experimental methods might be able to answer some long-standing questions in linguistic paremiology.