Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.29162/pv.43.1.1173
In search of proverbiality: “The root of all evil” construction in Romanian
Ioan Milică
orcid.org/0000-0002-7226-6946
*
* Corresponding author.
Abstract
The paper examines the Romanian construction A este X tuturor Y ‘A is the X of all Y’, as in Iubirea de arginți e rădăcina tuturor relelor ‘The love of money is the source of all evils’, from a corpus-based and probabilistic perspective on proverbiality. The study approaches the construction and its contextual instantiations as a productive network whose proverbial identity emerges from evaluative force, collocational strength and distributional constraint. Drawing on a small, curated corpus of 81 attestations spanning 1581 to 2008, the analysis describes and interprets the contextual syntagmatic dynamics across the three constructional slots (A, X, Y). The results show clear asymmetries: the A-slot allows controlled variation, while the X and Y slots display high degrees of lexical constraint and collocational convergence. The discussion maps the corpus findings onto a multidimensional model of proverbiality, addressing traditionality, stability, evaluativity, generality, grounding, symbolicity, and transferability. The study suggests that proverbiality is a probabilistic effect arising from recurrent structural alignment, semantic constraint and cultural reuse over time.
Keywords
proverbiality; corpus-based analysis; construction grammar; semantic clusters; Romanian proverbs
Hrčak ID:
349772
URI
Publication date:
26.7.2026.
Visits: 0 *