Proverbs Are Never Neutral

This book examines how proverbs can carry ethnonyms and contradictory oppositions in everyday speech, and interrogates the belief that such nuances are national in nature by comparing across languages and cultures. The authors bring together linguistic terms and typologies from Slavonic, Germanic, Romance, Finno-Ugric and Somali proverbs (with their English parallels) to enrich contrastive paremiology. The book pushes the thematic boundaries of the paremiological minima of languages by drawing on fields including sociolinguistics, and it will be of interest to students and scholars of cultural linguistics, comparative cultural studies, sociolinguistics, social identity, anthropology, cognitive semiotics, and the history of words and concepts.

Outi Lauhakangas is an independent researcher, D.Soc.Sc in Helsinki University, Finland. She is one of the editorial consultants of the international journal Proverbium and a co-organizer of international colloquiums on proverbs. She has been the chief editor of a cultural magazine in Finland and published several nonfiction books about genres of folklore.

Marina Yu. Kotova teaches in the Department of Slavonic Philology of Saint Petersburg State University, Russia. She is a co-organizer of international philological conferences. She is an author of 'Russian-Slavonic Dictionary of Proverbs with English parallels' (2000) and several monographs on contrastive paremiology, cultural studies, stylistics and translation studies.