Abstrakt
It is often taken for granted that proverbs, unlike phrasemes which are constituents of a sentence, are self-contained units with very little syntactic and semantic connection to the context. Nevertheless, when observed in text or speech, their autonomy is often reduced significantly: proverbs can be incorporated in a sentence as main or subordinate clauses, being often accompanied by textual elements referred to as markers or introducers.
Besides signaling the paremiological status of the unit, i.e. interpreting the statement nonliterally, these elements help to integrate the proverb in the syntactic and semantic structure of the text. The present study analyses the context of some very frequent Italian proverbs, extracted from the general reference corpus CORIS, in order to provide a syntactic and functional typology of their text introducers.