'As the saying (or whatever) goes': sayings and pseudo-sayings in the American press

Ramon Marti Solano (1)

1 CeReS - Centre de Recherches Sémiotiques

The main objective of this study is to investigate how the phrase ‘as the (old) saying goes’ is actually used in journalism—especially in the American press—and what types of units it introduces or refers to. We highlight the importance and pervasiveness of this phrase in this type of register as over 10,000 article results have been yielded by the online archives of The New York Times containing the target phrase. We claim that this string is applied to an enormous range of words and phrases going from adjectives, collocations and lexical bundles to actual sayings, proverbs and quotations. Our ultimate objective is to find out, observe and examine modern (and also less modern), popular proverbial phrases that seem to crop up in journalistic discourse.

Mots clés: introductory phrase; lexicalisation; proverbs; quotations; journalistic discourse

Domaines: Linguistique

Ramon Marti Solano. 'As the saying (or whatever) goes': sayings and pseudo-sayings in the American press. Proceedings of the 5th Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Proverbs, pp.377-388, 2012. ⟨hal-00933037⟩