Abstract Proverbs (as Time is money) are conventionalized expressions that are “equivalent to a sentence” and “express generalized experiences or value judgements” (Steyer 2015: 209-210). This study aims at describing the lexical structure of the proverb inventory and at identifying ‘proverbial keywords’ which may be assumed to play an important role in storing proverbs in the mind (Luckert 2018). A database of American English proverbs was compiled and content words were tested for their contextual predictability (with COCA as ‘normative corpus’ using a ‘goodness-of-fit’ test). The results suggest that 59.4 % of the word lemmas are significantly over-represented in the proverb corpus (i.e. ‘keywords’). This finding underpins the assumption that a considerable number of words are strongly associated with the proverb as a category. In the experimental part of the project it was tested whether the ‘keywords’ differ in how well they contribute to a strengthened memory representation of proverbs.

中文翻译：

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现代美国谚语的词汇简介：在美国英语谚语数据库中检测上下文可预测的关键字

摘要谚语（因为时间就是金钱）是“等于一句话”和“表达普遍经验或价值判断”的常规表达（Steyer 2015：209-210）。这项研究旨在描述谚语清单的词汇结构，并确定可能被认为在将谚语存储在大脑中起重要作用的``谚语关键词''（Luckert 2018）。汇编了一个美国英语谚语数据库，并测试了内容词的上下文可预测性（使用“适合度”检验将COCA用作“规范语料库”）。结果表明，谚语语料（即“关键词”）中词引词的59.4％明显过多。这一发现支持了这样的假设，即大量单词与谚语作为一个类别密切相关。