A Polyphonic Approach to French Proverbs and the Readings of the Combination ′Opinion Verb + Proverb′

다성적 관점에서 본 프랑스어 속담과 ′의견동사+속담′ 구문의 해독

This article aims to define the nature of proverbs from a polyphonic point of view and examine different readings of the complement involved in the combination of a proverb with a verb of personal opinion. An utterer of a proverb is not himself the author of the proverb. He may well be a 'speaker' of a proverb, but from a polyphonic view point he is not an 'enunciator' of the principle that underlies it. When we say that a speaker of a proverb is not its enunciator, we do not simply mean that he is not the author of the 'content' of the proverb he speaks: we mean that he is not the author of its 'form' either. The fact that a proverb loses its proverbial character when one paraphrases it proves that its form is not at the speaker's disposal. But a single factor cannot be held responsible for what a proverb is. As an indicator of the 'wisdom of the nation,' or vox populi, a proverb is the achievement of the 'collective enunciator.' The polyphony inherent in the proverb pits a particular speaker against a collective enunciator. This collective character of the proverb as a vox populi comes from its character as a phrasal denomination. Given that a proverb reflects a collective judgment and not a personal opinion, how do we interpret the combination of a proverb with a verb of personal opinion such as I think that ...\ulcorner Such a combination gives rise to readings at distinct levels: two types of metalinguistic reading and a reading based on the content of the proverb. The first level of reading, being applicative in nature, can be local or general, depending on the speaker's opinion as to the applicability of the proverb to a situation, particular or general. These applicative readings always involve polyphonic dissociation between the speaker and the enunciator. The second level of reading, which depends on the content of the proverb, is the result of the operation of deproverbialization, which makes the proverb lose its denominative status to preserve only its status as a generic phrase. The proverb, thus deproverbialized, looks like the series 'NP + VP.' For this reading, the speaker of the proverb takes into consideration the possibility of attributing a predicate to a nominal syntagm. Here occurs an identity between the speaker and the enunciator. It is not the case, however, that one can deproverbialize just any proverbs. In approaching to a locally typifying generic phrase, a proverb admits of being deproverbialized by an opinion verb only when its form does not render it difficult, either syntactically or metaphorically, to incorporate that proverb into the relevant combination, and when the proverb intrinsically possesses the traits that meet the conditions for the use of the opinion verb at hand. One can also maintain, based on the notion of deproverbialization, that a proverb expresses a collective judgment, a deproverbialized individual judgment.