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    STUDIA PHILOLOGIA - Issue no. 1 / 2000  
         
  Article:   LES PROVERBES ET LES ENONCES METAREPRESENTATIONNELS / PROVERBS AND METAREPRESENTATIONS.

Authors:  JEAN-MICHEL GOUVARD.
 
       
         
  Abstract:  Proverbs and Metarepresentations. In this paper, I apply the Recanati’s theory of metarepresentations, showing that when we use a verb of belief to introduce a proverb (e.g. I believe that dead men tell no tales), we utter a more complex proposition, from a semantic point of view, that when we assert a proverb without such a prefix (e.g. Dead men tell no tales). When we say "Dead men tell no tales", we assert a fact concerning the actual world; but when we say "I believe that dead men tell no tales", we assert two facts: the fact that "I believe that P", concerning the actual world, and the fact that "dead men tell no tales", concerning the world of my beliefs. Such a theory could help us to explain some linguistic approaches of proverbs. In French semantics, a semantician as G. Kleiber says that proverb is a name refering to a statement about human ways of life when we assert it in isolation, and that it becomes a proposition (that is to say, a linguistic expression having lost is name statut) when we introduce it with a verb of belief. I suggest that this lexical description is in fact induce by the semantic complexity of metarepresentation, as we can understand it in the Recanati’s framework, and that it could be useful to link analyses like Kleiber’s one with philosophy of language, in the aim to explain some stinctions we made in our linguistics works.  
         
     
         
         
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