Distinguishing Between Proverbs and Sayings According to Josef Mlacek’s Classification in Dictionaries and Paremiological Collections: The Case of Explanations of Meaning in Two Slovenian Dictionaries
Distinguishing Between Proverbs and Sayings According to Josef Mlacek’s Classification in Dictionaries and Paremiological Collections: The Case of Explanations of Meaning in Two Slovenian Dictionaries

Summary/Abstract: Among the genre characteristics of proverbs and sayings in Slavic paremiology, this article focuses mainly on the question of the generality or concretisation of the meanings of the expressions denoted by these two terms, which is one of the key criteria of the terminological distinctions between proverbs and sayings in Jozef Mlacek’s theory. These criteria are used when explanations of meaning are prepared for paremiological expressions in eSSKJ (Dictionary of the Slovenian Standard Language) and SPP (Dictionary of Proverbs and Similar Paremiological Expressions). Both Slovenian dictionaries rely on the analysis of the paremiological expressions in language corpora. In the beginning of the article, three theoretical classifications of sayings (by Grigory Permyakov, Jan Mukařovský and Jozef Mlacek) according to the relationship between phrasemes with texteme status and phrasemes with the status of a sentence element are compared. In the article, examples of prototypical sayings and prototypical proverbs are presented, as well as borderline cases where the very formulation of a dictionary explanation of meaning reveals key differences that allow for a more certain determination whether the expression in question is a saying or proverb. The article presents three groups of prototypical sayings that differ in how they achieve semantic concretisation: through a time-limit on the developments, through a highlighted relationship between the developments and the utterance and through criticising a certain modus operandi.

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