Nine months of winter, three of scorching hell: Portuguese meteorological adage...

• Autor(es): Martins, Cláudia Susana Nunes
• Data: 2013
• Identificador Persistente: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/8742
• Origem: Biblioteca Digital do IPB
• Assunto(s): Compositionality; Idiomaticity; Frozenness; Meteorological adages
• Tipo de Documento: Parte ou capítulo de livro
• Idioma: Inglês

Descrição

This paper intends to discuss the topic of fixed language from a linguistic standpoint, namely resorting to concepts of phraseology and paremiology. These will enable us to approach the problematic issue of word combinations, which are traditionally divided into free combinations and restricted combinations, and also consider their main characteristics, mainly lexicalisation, non-compositionality, syntactic irregularity (or frozenness) and semantic irregularity (or idiomaticity). The latter combinations comprise, for example, collocations, idiomatic expressions and proverbs, which account for the major output of human speakers – people speak in set phrases, as Mel’čuk (1998) upholds. However, restricted word combinations are culturally-bound and, as such, should be understood within the history and culture that produced them. One such case concerns the use of meteorological adages in Portugal, an extremely productive collection of popular sayings which aim at summarising weather observation made by consecutive generations and concluding about their influence and effect on farming throughout the year.