Linguistic stereotypes: crosscultural analysis of proverbs

The aim of this paper is to analyse proverbs as linguistic stereotypes from a semantic point of view. The sample of proverbs is randomly chosen from 3 national collections: Croatian, English and Italian. The results of the analysis show that quite a small number of proverbs (about 10%) reflect traditional values and customs which are specific to one culture only. It seems that their universal character makes an ethnocentric approach nearly unacceptable. A high percentage of proverbs (90%) share a very strong mutual resemblance, despite all the differences stemming from ethnic, geographic, historical and language factors. The prevalence of equivalent, synonymous proverbs over specific ones is evident. They differ only in their immagery, in local realia and concepts, but the logical formula of their content is identical. The most frequent sentence structure of the proverbs with universal distrubution is the quadripartite structure and its main feature is symmetry. Does it mean that such sentences can be considered as some kind of kernel sentences? This question asks for additional research. Finally, we can make a conclusion that the universality and transferability are the most prominent features of the proverbs.