A Quantitative Approach to Lexical Structure of Proverbs

As has been repeatedly pointed out elsewhere, the linguistic structure of proverbs has hardly ever been seriously studied with regard to underlying regularities. Basically, proverb research has hardly ever transgressed the level of symptomatic descriptions and not yet reached a systematic level (Grzybek 2000a, 2000b, 2001, 2002). Quite logically, first attempts at filling the evident gaps in this field of research have concentrated on rather special problems, such as on the question if sentence length or word length of proverbs can be systematically described. In this respect, special attention has been paid to the development of adequate methods which go beyond traditional approaches, confining themselves to the tabulation of absolute or relative frequencies, their means, or the presentation of simple graphs. Specifically, the seemingly trivial questions have been asked, how often words or sentences of a given length occur in proverbs, and if these frequencies can be modelled by way of mathematical and/or statistical devices. Irrespective of the seeming simplicity of these questions, a number of successive assumptions come into play which make the underlying complexity of the whole problem evident; it is assumed that: