Proverb Familiarity in the United States: Cross-Regional Comparisons of the Paremiological Minimum

Abstract

Despite recent calls for establishing a paremiological minimum for the United States, there has been little systematic empirical attention devoted to the issue of proverb familiarity in this country or to the possibility that geographic differences might preclude establishing a single paremiological minimum that would be equally representative of proverb familiarity in diverse regions around the country. This article reviews the call for establishing a paremiological minimum for the United States and the relevant efforts to date. The article then summarizes the results of a study of proverb familiarity among college students in four different regions of the United States, presenting results from both a proverb familiarity rating task and a proverb generation task. These data make it possible to determine the relative familiarity of several hundred proverbs and to assess the possibility that familiarity with these proverbs varies across regions. The success of this approach is evidence that this type of nomothetic and quantitative analysis of folkloric material can be a useful complement to performance-oriented research. For example, the results suggest some limits to the verisimilitude of people’s intuitions as to the currency and familiarity of proverbial texts, as proverbs often listed as "common" were sometimes shown to be relatively unfamiliar (at least to contemporary college students). Further, although statistical analyses of the data did reveal that there may be some difference in absolute levels of familiarity across regions, it was also clear that the relative familiarity of various proverbs nonetheless shows strong stability from one region to another. In general, then, the data presented here provide clear evidence that proverbs familiar in one region of the United States can generally be expected to be familiar in other regions as well; this finding suggests that a truly national paremiological minimum may well be achievable.

The visual representations of a Biblical proverb and its modifications in the Internet space

“…Litovkina & Mieder 2006), no variations of this proverb have been found at all. This proverb is not included in the list of Anglo-American paremiological minimum, or in the list of Anglo-American paremiological optimum (Mieder 1993;Haas 2008;Fiedler 2015). It cannot be found in the Folklore Archives of the University of California at Berkeley among the 151 proverbs there, most frequently collected by Alan Dundes' students.…”

“…Péter Barta, Hrisztalina Hrisztova-Gotthardt, Anna T. Litovkina, and Katalin Vargha have conducted a number of comparative studies on anti-proverbs, highlighting different aspects of proverb alterations, namely: types of variations, wordplay, language humour and topics occurring in them (for detailed analyses of techniques of alteration and humour devices most frequently employed in Anglo-American, German, French, Russian and Hungarian antiproverbs, see Barta et al 2008Barta et al , 2009Hrisztova-Gotthardt et al 2007, 2008T. Litovkina et al 2008aT.…”

Typological Similarities of Paremiological Units About "Labour" (On the Basis of English, Russian and Kazakh Languages)

“…There are universal generalities in the lexis of the paremiological units, as the meanings of the words in different nations' proverbs are repeated. The similarity of paremiological units of non-relative languages is considered as not genetic but typological (Haas, 2008).…”

Amerykańskie przysłowia we współczesnej polszczyźnie

“…Heather A. Haas (2008) ustaliła, że tylko dwa (It takes two to a tango i The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence) znalazły się na liście najczęściej rozpoznawanych przysłów. Z kolei z tych 16 przysłów 9 (zaznaczone rozstrzeleniem) zostało uznanych za najnowsze przysłowia amerykańskie według wydanego kilka lat temu leksykonu "nowych paremii amerykańskich" Charlesa Claya Doyle'a, Wolfganga Miedera i Freda R. Shapiro (2012).…”