Text Introducers of Proverbs and Other Idioms

Abstract

On the basis of two large and comparable coropora, British National Corpus and Czech National Corpus, a hypothesis that at least some idioms are introduced by special introducers in text is explored. Twenty most frequent proverbs and twenty collocational idioms have been studied and the hypothesis have been proved as correct. Next to these basic results, the nature and behaviour of these introducers in text have been studied which enabled there classification into formal and semantic types. Some relevant differences between English and Czech languages in their use have been noted, too, and it is suggested that more languages shoud become object of a study along these lines.