La manipolazione creativa del proverbio negli usi comici e pubblicitari della lingua italiana

The present work investigates deliberate modifications of traditional proverbs in Italian. Despite their ubiquity, Italian anti-proverbs (as they are usually referred to in international debate) have not been studied much. Since an official terminology has not been established yet, we propose to use the Italian neologism “paraproverbio” to refer to all those intentional alterations of an existing proverb, particularly with comic or advertising purposes. A preliminary definition of the proverb revealed to be necessary to cut off from our analysis those phraseological units which are often confused with proverbs, while they differ from them in some linguistic or pragmatic properties. The aim of this thesis is to study these phraseological units from various aspects, such as the modifying techniques and the purposes underlying the creating process. After proposing a classification of the transforming procedures (substitutions, permutations, additions, suppressions, contaminations), a pragmatic analysis is offered. An examination of comic strategies, based on a corpus of anti-proverbs from printed and Internet collections, shows how proverbs have been made the object of humour not only by authors as Marcello Marchesi and Totò but also by common people using them on the Internet to ironize on different aspects of life. The manipulation of proverbs by copywriters is then examined, proving how the paremiological repertoire and its authoritative tone is captured for commercial aims. In this work we also affirm that the copious and universal production of anti-proverbs is an argument in favour of the vitality of the proverb, which then negate claims about the extinction of proverbs in modern society.