The existence of various approaches to attributing the proverb to different branches of linguistics is due to the narrow, often intuitive, understanding of its meaning as an ancient, generalized and transmitted one of folk descent. The similarity with units of paremiology, as defined in explanatory and terminological dictionaries, brings even more confusion to the issue of delimiting recited forms. Indeed, aphorisms, apophthegms, maxims are semantically and structurally very similar to proverbs because, like proverbs, they are concise, often self-sufficient statements of an instructive nature, which are read, understood, and interpreted independently of the surrounding text. All these recited forms also have a stable syntactic and semantic structure, and, at first glance, it is difficult to judge which of the expressions is an aphorism, a maxim, an apothegm, and which a proverb. Thus, analyzing the features of the proverb as a language unit, that is, its similarity with other oral art forms, semantic and syntactic completeness and autonomy, and its bipartite structure, as well as determining common and different features of paremiological units, the most complete definition of the proverb and criteria for delimiting recited forms may be found. Here, autonomy means the feature of a unit to be in any part of speech, and completeness – the unit’s functioning as a self-sufficient expression. The attention is also paid to the bipartite structure, as most units (approx. 65%) are rhythmically constructed compound or complex sentences.
The research is based on French, Russian, and Latvian theoretical and empirical material; the sources of the units are dictionaries and collections of proverbs in three languages compiled in the 20th century.