Verbless predicative structures in Persian paroemias

Abstract

Many books and articles are devoted to Persian phraseology, but insuffi cient attention has been paid to the description and classification of verbless sentences. Among all sentential idioms, proverbs, sayings and other figurative statements are of great interest. The purpose of this work is to describe the most common types of verbless sentential idioms, their syntactic and semantic structures and patterns of functioning. The structures of verbless sentences (VS) that form Persian proverbs are based on ellipsis. The elimination of the verb enhances the style of statements. The language of paroemias becomes more capacious. Combined with other means, such as use of archaic lexemes and their obsolete forms, this achieves an antique stylization. The deviation of the style of proverbs from the style of everyday speech attracts the addressee’s attention. Some nominal parts of speech possess inherent predicativity and therefore do not combine with other predicative units, such as personal forms of the verb. The majority of bipartite phraseological units oppose the first judgment to the second. Within complex judgments, the components are most often connected asyndetically or with the enclitical conjunction -o ‘and’. In many polypredicative paroemias, the first clause contains a finite verb, and the subsequent ones are elliptical sentences with an omitted verb. The copula is usually omitted in all clauses. A number of verbless sentences in paroemias are distinguished by the emphatic word order, with the attribute preceding its head. Most of the sayings, from the point of view of information structure, refer to the situation as a whole and therefore are thetic sentences with a non-inherent topic and the given which is expressed in a preliminary context.