Idioms and sayings: the nature of knowledges

Abstract

Proverbs and idiomatic expressions resemble themselves as being composed of sentences whose literal reading is not intended. The omission of the agent in the languages allows the semantic reading of the verbal phrase, but the same operation totally destroys the nature of proverbs. Moreover, in proverbs, the extralinguistic intent of counseling or moral valuation is an integral part of meaning. It is surprising how moral similarity can be expressed through morphosyntactic structures and lexical fills whose literal translation may be very diverse, but obeys a universal pattern structured with a logic, also universal, that resembles Universal Grammar. In this work, we assume a modular theory of mind: the meaning of an idiomatic expression and the judgment of a type of behavior present in proverbs come from different modules.