Abstract
Paremiology is the study of proverbs. Proverb is a debated notion, defined either as an extended sentence which transmits generalized wide spread sententious meaning (Oddo 2017: 215‒220) or as a phrase with sententious meaning (Oddo 2017: 219‒227; Seiler 1918 şi Claver Zouogbo 2008: 68, apud Oddo 2017: 220). An umbrella term is paremia. The formal and the semantic structure of proverbs do not always overlap, i.e. there are various cases of semantic binarism which is not overtly projected in syntax or lexis. We illustrate the logical relations of consequence, opposition, comparison and condition with examples extracted from French proverbs including religious terms. The analysis shows two aspects: on the one hand a rich inventory of grammatical, lexical, stylistic and semantic strategies to construct binarism, and on the other hand suggests a distinction between binarism projected as logical relations and binarism obtained via stylistic and rhetorical figures.
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