Establishing the paremiological minimum of European Portuguese

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to present the paremiological minimum of European Portuguese, i.e., the list of the most widely known and frequently used proverbs employed by most speakers of the European Portuguese language community. To establish the paremiological minimum of European Portuguese, different methodological procedures have been applied, over a period of five years. In the first phase, a digital database with more than 114,000 entries (proverbs and variants) was collected and a first manual selection of the most common proverbs was made, and then the agreement between annotators was calculated, which was quite high. The frequency of proverbs and variants (number of occurrences) was also calculated in several sources: (1) in dictionaries and collections of proverbs; (2) in a corpus of journalistic texts (CETEMPúblico, Santos & Rocha, 2001); (3) in Portuguese and Portuguese as a Foreign Language textbooks; and (4) in two search engines (Google and Bing). Two distinct online questionnaires were also applied. A list of 318 proverbs – the paremiological minimum of European Portuguese - was thus obtained. The list of the 318 proverbs may have several applications, either for the development of diagnostic or therapeutic tools for certain language pathologies, or for learning Portuguese as a foreign language.