Typology of Introductive Formulas in Kwakum Proverbs

Kwaèkuàm is a Bantu language of zone A according to Guthrie (1967: 496). It is listed A90. Its code is [463], Binam Bikoï (2012:141). Generally, when we want to produce a proverbial statement, the speaker does not surprise his audience. He prepares it using various introductory formulas. The same is true in the kwaèkuàm community. In doing so, our paper examines the formal introductory structures found in kwaèkuàm proverbs and which make it possible to delimit the “proverbial mold” and to identify a sentence as a proverb in a speech. Five hundred proverbs collected from ten speakers aged 50 and over constitute our corpus. From the categorization of the recurring motifs of the forms and rhythms of the proverbial saying, it emerges that the paremic initiation formulas are in the initial position of the proverbial sentence. The specificity of the proverbial statement is that it constitutes a “fixed” genre of oral literature. Moreover, this is what makes it recognized in a statement.