8 Empirical Research and Paremiological Minimum

Abstract

Paremiology is researching the origin, development and the existence of paremies, i. e. proverbs, folk and weather sayings and riddles.Attempts to establish a paremiological minimum have still been oriented on the concept of the set of proverbs that all members of society know or an average adult is expected to know. So the concept of paremiological minimum has been in fact reduced to proverbs, which an average adult is expected to be familiar with. Thus, the proper term used should be the proverbial minimum. The traditional methods used to elicit answers from informants are based on the lists of proverbs or proverb beginnings and informants are asked to state their active or passive knowledge or add the missing part. Another method used is to list all the proverbs which could informants think of during a certain period. One of the first scholars who used demographic methods with proverbs was the American sociologist William Albig (1931). 68 university students were asked to list all the proverbs they could think of during a thirty minute period. A total of 1443 proverbs were written down, out of which 442 were different proverbs (Albig, 1931: 532). The concept of paremiological minimum was first developed by Grigorij Permjakov (1973, 1982). The spontaneous question "And what is then a paremiological maximum?" couldn´t be answered reliably at least due to following reasons. Firstly, there are different opinions what a proverb is, what the boundaries of it in comparison to other types of multiword units and other fixed sentences are, secondly there are no comprehensive collections or exhaustive demographic investigation of all proverbs in a language. The biggest proverb collections include as a rule a mixture of all types of fixed phrases from different historical periods. The author of the biggest collection of German proverbs Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander included in his work Das Deutsche Sprichwörter-Lexikon (1867)127 more than 250 000 items. Valerij Mokijenko estimates the number of proverbs in Russian at more than 150 000 items (Mokijenko, 2012: 81). The demographic attempts have still been limited to small samples of items examined by small numbers of informants, not representative regarding age, sex, regional and educational dispersion of the population. Gregorij Permjakov128 conducted in 1970s paremiological experiments to find out the minimum set of Russian proverbs that all people know. A group of informants living in and near Moscow were 127 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanders_Deutsches_Sprichw%C3%B6rter-Lexikon 128 See the detailed bibliography of G. L. Permjakov´s work in Grzybek, 1984.

Establishment of a Chinese Paremiological Minimum Based on International English Media

“…Later the minimum was reduced to 300 items for smaller dictionaries in bilingual languages, e.g. Russian-German, Russian-Bulgarian (Ďurčo, 2015;Permjakov, 1989). The demographic methods still bear the limitation of small samples of items and the small number of informants, but the concept of high familiarity and bilingual model provides a worthy reference for the establishment of an acceptable minimum.…”

“…Mieder's phrenological minimum with high frequency is based on his previous archived sample of 1200 items, and large proverb collections which contain 5500 items from more than 6000 books and newspapers. His small list consists of 33 frequent proverbs with more than 13 references in observed texts (Ďurčo, 2015;Mieder, 1993). Though Mieder's minimum work was not based on modern corpus research, the large number of data resource guaranteed the validation of the currency and frequency in that situation.…”