LA NOURRITURE ET LA BOISSON DANS LES PROVERBES DÉTOURNÉS DU FRANÇAIS
FOOD AND BEVERAGE IN PROVERBS DISTURBED FROM FRENCH

Summary/Abstract: To fill a gap in paremiology, this study, based on a 100-item corpus, deals with French anti-proverbs about food and drink (both being important subjects in France). The paper begins with a discussion of the difficulties involved in distinguishing proverb variants from anti-proverbs and then proceeds to describe those characteristics shared by the proverbs and anti-proverbs on these subjects: there are twice as many expressions about food as about drink and five times as many about alcohol as about soft drinks; furthermore, proverbs and anti-proverbs possess a similar distribution of usage labels and similar pairs of antonymic utterances. But there are notable ways in which the proverbs differ from the anti-proverbs: while proverbs tend to discourage excess, anti-proverbs celebrate it; and while proverbs focus on wine, anti-proverbs mention mainly beer. Anti-proverbs about food and drink are a characteristic part of the French anti-proverbial stock, sharing several peculiarities with the genre as a whole (e.g., including the proportion of compound proverbs in both corpuses, as well as the proportion of items that are most frequently used).

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