Grammatical Structures of Proverbs
Proverbs in various languages are found with a wide variety of grammatical structures. In English. for example, we find the following structures (in addition to others):
- Imperative, negative - Don't beat a dead horse.
- Imperative, positive - Look before you leap.
- Parallel phrases - Garbage in, garbage out.
- Rhetorical question - Is the Pope Catholic?
- Declarative sentence - Birds of a feather flock together.
However, people will often quote only a fraction of a proverb to invoke an entire proverb, e.g. "All is fair" instead of "All is fair in love and war", and "A rolling stone" for "A rolling stone gathers no moss."
Read more about this topic: Proverb
Famous quotes containing the words grammatical, structures and/or proverbs:
“Evil is simply
a grammatical error:
a failure to leap
the precipice
between he
and I.”
—Linda Pastan (b. 1932)
“It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.”
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“He that seeks trouble never misses.”
—17th-Century English proverb, first collected in George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs (1640)