The Aphorism as a Small-Genre Text in English and American Literature

This paper presents a comparative linguistic and cultural analysis of English and American aphorisms, since both traditions have produced many famous sayings, although neither has yet developed a strong theoretical school of aphoristics. The study also compares Anglo-American aphorism with the French tradition, and it analyzes the structural complexity, the dominance of verbs, and the variety of syntactic forms that are typical of English sayings. The paper concludes that, despite the absence of a clear theoretical framework, the Anglo-American aphoristic tradition is rich, diverse, and worthy of further linguistic and cultural research.