We tried in this work classifying the combinatorial syntactic types of symmetric binary structure of the French proverbs on the basis of the definition of these proverbs, analyzing several semantic internal relations of the symmetric words in contrast ...
We tried in this work classifying the combinatorial syntactic types of symmetric binary structure of the French proverbs on the basis of the definition of these proverbs, analyzing several semantic internal relations of the symmetric words in contrast, as well as the repetitive aspects of the identical words, and finally distinguishing those semantic characteristics with regard to the global structure.
At first, we defined the ‘symmetric binary proverb’ by integrating the parallelism and the chiasmus into the ‘symmetry’, thereby extracting four binary structures.
Secondly, we classified the types of combinatorial syntactic structure, that is ‘clause + clause’, ‘noun phrase + noun phrase’, ‘adjective phrase + adjective phrase’, ‘adverbial phrase + adverbial phrase’, ‘quantifier phrase + quantifier phrase’, ‘participial phrase + participial phrase’, ‘prepositional phrase + prepositional phrase’, the most frequent being the second type.
In the third place, we distinguished, as internal semantic relations of the symmetric words in contrast, the relation of opposition, the relation of metaphor, the relation of metonymy, the relation of growth, the relation of causality, the relation of culture, the relation of association, and described the semantic characteristics of these relations.
We then analyzed, within the framework of the internal structure of these proverbs, four repetitive aspects of the identical words : anaphora, epistrophe, repetition in the middle, chiasmus, the anaphora being the most frequent.
Lastly, we distinguished the global semantic structures and clarified their semantic characteristics: conditional structure, causal structure, comparative structure, coordinate structure and paradoxical structure.
We can conclude that all these syntactico-semantic characteristics contribute to activate the rhetoric liveliness, the esthetic feeling of these proverbs, to increase their argumentative functions and finally to strengthen their persuasive and didactic values.