What is Geoparoemiology?

Geoparoemiology is a discipline which originated about thirty years ago from the first research carried out by students from the University of Urbino, who applied to paroemiology the criteria of geolinguistics. The study of traditional paroemiologic facts according to a geographic perspective has introduced and evaluated even in the paroemiologic field, the concept of “variant” and that correlated from the variant “horizontal” study.

So here there is a new vision of paroemiology. The proverb is first defined under a functional aspect, which (contrary to the traditional concept of amateur teaching) is the communicative one as it would appear from its mechanism of memory recall, which is common to every element of articulated language.

On the other hand, just its quality of stereotypic formula of conversation, of the element of linguistic oral tradition justifies its being passed on from one generation to another. If, as has been done for thousands of years, the proverb were considered simply as an expression of popular wisdom, such facts would have no explanation.

Geoparoemiology distinguishes the "true" proverb, called “detto paremiaco” (DP), the expression of popular wisdom, from the "spurious" one, or “detto didattico” (DD), expression of popular science, which is tautological, confirming nothing from its banal reading  (per la Candelora - dell'inverno siamo fora, santa Lucìa - la notte più lunga che ci sia).

Geoparoemiology is interested in both, because even the second presents forms of high linguistic interest. But its prime object is the paroemiac saying,  which defines allologic, brachylogic and analogic because it is valuable in communicating synthetically and allusively, something different from the reading, something which is drawn out not logically but intuitively, analogous to the proposed figure (il diavolo fa le pentole - ma non i coperchi).

The values applied to single situations can be many (and still more the more generic the result of enunciation for example "uno - non è nessuno". So one cannot talk about a unique significance of a DP, but of a unity, sometimes heterogeneous, and never limitable a priori, because human imagination will always be able to find a new unpredictable application. One can only talk of a range of possible figurative values, which the School of Geoparoemiology calls “valore paremiaco” (VP).

According to the Geoparoemiological doctrine, the DP is, together with other formulas (such as ways of saying) an very important instrument of the structure of every idiom, such as  “segno retorico”, component of the “codice retorico”. This is a sub-system which is to be postulated within each language code, in order to  comprehend the linguistic matter “motivated” by a cultural tradition.

We are dealing with traditional instruments of Rhetoric, or the art of saying and convincing; and also of poetry, with which, in fact, the proverb shares formal characteristics such as rhyme and, above all, rhythm. As with the linguistic sign the rhetoric sign is unitary and indivisible: its significance is made up of the entire formula, and can emerge only by its complete enunciation.

Within an identical linguistic code, a rhetoric sign and a linguistic sign belong to two sub-systems not only distinct but in opposition to each other and on differing levels, the first overlying the second whose semantic unity (head words) are needed to compose their own units (macro-head words).

The vast whole formed by the “paremie” (brief traditional syntagmatic sequences synthesizing a complete message) and that which in every cultural tradition best reflects the poetic moment of fantasy, of the linguistic activity, that which talks in a direct way – analogic and synthetic – using figures or similes. By its suppression, an idiom would remain profoundly mutilated and unnatural.

The international fame obtained  after the first A.P.I. Meeting (1995) induced the organizers of the First International Congress of Paremiology  (Madrid, 1996) to put the image of our discipline, and of API's work, as the opening relation. This one has seen printing one year later, during the publication of a study about "Geoparémiologie" in France.