Proverb Introducers in a Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Perspective. A contrastive study of English and Polish tags used to introduce proverbs

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to compare the forms and usage of proverb introducers in English and in Polish. It has often been observed that the word 'proverb' is used less often to introduce proverbs in English than its equivalents in other languages, and its relatively low frequency in the British National Corpus as compared to the frequencies of its equivalents in the corpora of Polish or Czech seems to support this claim. The use of the word 'proverb' is likely to be related to the status of proverbs and language-specific ways of speaking, therefore an attempt is made here to discuss the use of 'proverb' and its Polish equivalent 'przysłowie' with reference to English and Polish cultural history.