Irish (early and modern) Research Papers (original) (raw)

""One of the key areas of international paremiological scholarship in modern times has been the analysis of proverbial markers and the concept of ‘proverbiality’ (Arora, 1984). Many scholars have directed their attention to questions of ‘proverbial style’ in order to identify which internal and external markers distinguish the proverb from its surrounding discourse, and to analyse how these devices operate in different world languages. Of these markers, it is universally agreed that proverbial ‘style’ incorporates, to varying degrees, poetic devices, such as parallelism, ellipsis, alliteration and rhyme, and also semantic devices such as metaphor, personification, paradox, and hyperbole (Mieder, 2004:7). The major works of the paremiological canon in the English language, including Taylor (1931), Whiting (1932), and Mieder (2004), have provided a synoptic overview of these devices, but language-specific studies have also contributed to our overall understanding of proverbial style through detailed examinations of structure and style in various languages throughout the world, including Ancient Greek, Ancient Egyptian, (Cairene) Arabic, English, American English, Esperanto, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Igbo, Italian, Latin, Russian, Spanish, Tamil, Welsh, Yoruba, and numerous other African languages. Inevitably such studies of style, particularly those dealing with poetic features, have also featured in structuralist treatments of the illusive issue of proverb definition. In spite of such pioneering scholarship, the fact remains that, unfortunately, there has been no comprehensive examination of the style and structure of Irish-language proverbs, and while Robinson (1945) and De Bric (1976) have provided cursory examinations of Irish proverbs, and touched upon general questions of structure and proverbial formulas, there has been no thorough treatment of the material. This paper, being the first section of a more comprehensive, detailed analysis of proverbial style and structure in the Irish language, seeks to begin to readdress this imbalance by providing a linguistic description and analysis of the most salient aspects of syntax in
Irish-language proverbs.""