Les proverbes : des règles de vie souvent hors la loi

Abstract

Spanish proverbs are general prescriptive principles, since they systematically induce a directive act. Guardians of a natural logic, they admit exceptions and are therefore flexible didactic norms. Nevertheless, they remain rules of life, which are exceptional because they prove to be potentially irrelevant for communication. Indeed, not only the fixity of their form may resist the natural evolution of languages and the speaker’s intentionality, but their meaning can be ambiguous in synchrony or diachrony.

Keywords

• proverb
• directive act
• fixity
• intentionality
• ambiguity