The Colors of Proverbs in Portuguese: From Portugal to Brazil and from Angola to Timor
The Colors of Proverbs in Portuguese: From Portugal to Brazil and from Angola to Timor

Summary/Abstract: At the semantic-pragmatic level proverbs have a relatively autonomous structure and may even be considered, somehow, a kind of microtexts. This characteristic has led us to use them to test the mechanisms of synesthesia in languages, namely to try to understand whether proverbs not directly linked to color (such as the Portuguese proverb “Who wants everything, loses everything”) provoke semantic-cognitive processes that imply non-random color associations. For this, from a group of 9 Portuguese proverbs without direct reference to color, we collect the answers given to a set of surveys carried out in Portugal (EP – European Portuguese) and in Brazil (BP – Brazilian Portuguese), which, on the one hand, show that we can say that each proverb has specific colors and, on the other hand, that there are differences between these colors for EP and BP. In a second phase, we collected data on the same proverbs in Angola (AP – Angola Portuguese) and East Timor (TiP – East Timor Portuguese) in order to compare the results with those obtained in Portugal and Brazil and thus try to verify some relations between languages and cultures that these differences may show.

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