A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF PROVERBS BUILT AS PHRASES IN ENGLISH, ROMANIAN AND RUSSIAN

After discussing briefly the concept of phrase, the present research aims at analysing from the syntactic point of view the paremiological phrases that appear in reputable dictionaries of proverbs of English, Romanian and Russian languages as independent units, not included in the proverbs built as sentences or complex sentences.. At paremiological level, we highlight in the three languages the frequency of word combinations represented by 1) noun phrases with no predication, 2) verb phrases that include infinitival constructions and 3) adjective phrases that have the principal term expressed by an adjective. The phraseological organization at paremiological level has a special importance because on the basis of the relationship between the two combining elements, determinate and determinant, the main figures of style in the proverbs are created, the metaphor and the comparison.