La Nourriture et la Boisson Dans Les Proverbes Détournés du Français

Barta, Péter (2007) La Nourriture et la Boisson Dans Les Proverbes Détournés du Français. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 52 (1). pp. 207-218. ISSN 1216-9803

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Abstract

To fill a gap in paremiology, this study, based on a 100-item corpus, deals with French anti-proverbs about food and drink (both being important subjects in France). The paper begins with a discussion of the difficulties involved in distinguishing proverb variants from anti-proverbs and then proceeds to describe those characteristics shared by the proverbs and anti-proverbs on these subjects: there are twice as many expressions about food as about drink and five times as many about alcohol as about soft drinks; furthermore, proverbs and anti-proverbs possess a similar distribution of usage labels and similar pairs of antonymic utterances. But there are notable ways in which the proverbs differ from the anti-proverbs: while proverbs tend to discourage excess, anti-proverbs celebrate it; and while proverbs focus on wine, anti-proverbs mention mainly beer.Anti-proverbs about food and drink are a characteristic part of the French anti-proverbial stock, sharing several peculiarities with the genre as a whole (e.g., including the proportion of compound proverbs in both corpuses, as well as the proportion of items that are most frequently used).

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