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In general, the majority of native or near-native speakers of a certain language can easily identify a sentence as a proverb. They are able to do this due to different structural features, among others. These specific syntactic structures appear quite frequently in proverbs and serve as a warning sign that the particular text is deviant from the surrounding discourse and is, most probably, a proverb. The so-called proverbial formulae, e.g. Better X, than Y; When you X (you) Y; No X, no Y etc., are considered to be one of the most easily recognizable proverbial characteristics. They often serve as basic syntactic models and lend themselves readily for the insertion of new contents (cf. Taylor 1985: 16). In his study Structural Aspects of Proverbs, Mac Coinnigh has shown that proverbs from different languages, for instance English, Estonian, Finnish, German and Swedish, share the same or a very similar syntactic architecture (Mac Coinnigh 2015: 117–120). The Irish linguist, however, did not consider examples from the Bulgarian language. Therefore, one of the main aims of the present paper is to investigate which of the structural models recorded in previous paremiological works (Kuusi 1987 (1966); Röhrich and Mieder 1977; Permjakov 1979; Mieder 2006a and 2012 etc.) can be identified in traditional Bulgarian proverbs and in what frequency. Moreover, the study intends to test the widespread hypothesis that humorous proverb innovations and variations (anti-proverbs) are often created based on proverbial formulae (Litovkina 2015: 333). For the purposes of the study, two corpora of 649 proverbs and 370 anti-proverbs were analyzed. The corpora have been previously built by Hrisztova-Gotthardt and Gotthardt (Hrisztova-Gotthardt 2006 and 2010b; Hrisztova-Gotthardt and Gotthardt 2011 and 2012). The qualitative analysis has shown that 14 out of the 16 structural formulae listed by Röhrich and Mieder (1977) and Mieder (2006a and 2012) can be found in Bulgarian proverbs. The most common formula was He who Xs, Ys, serving as a syntactic model for 48 different commonly used proverbs. In case of anti-proverbs, the present structural model could be clearly identified in 30 out of 370 texts. The most prominent formulae were He who Xs, Ys, X is Y and Better X than Y.

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