Se non è zuppa, è pan bagnato. Invarianti tematiche e variazioni fraseologiche e paremiologiche nella Romània
Se non è zuppa, è pan bagnato. Invariant Topics vs. Phraseological and Paremiological Variations in Romània

Summary/Abstract: The contrastive approach of Italian and Romanian paremiological and phraseological units is trying now to extend the analysis also to other national Romance languages. Excluding the cases in which there is a perfect formal and semantic match between the proverbs and idioms all over Romània (due to Latin linguistic heritage, biblical transmission or simple loan translations), the paper seeks to identify the various possible categories of formal Romance dissimilarity in expressing the same idea. The less important ones belong to morphological variations in verbal time or noun number; a second category of proverbs and set phrases are a consequence of synonymic substitution in the same language (port. fome canina / de lobo), or in different languages (rom. cu o floare nu se face primăvară vs. it. una rondine non fa primavera). There are many cases in which several parallel variants coexist in the same language (sp. gallina vieja hace buen caldo / hace gorda la cocina). The most spectacular cases are those in which the same semantic invariant, present throughout Romània, is expressed in completely unexpected ways in the different regions of the Latin heritage (rom. ca nuca în perete, it. come cavolo a merenda).

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