Proverbs with Religious Terms in Romanian and Spanish

In the present study, the issue of phrastic (interlinguistic) variation is analyzed in depth by delimiting it from the concept of synonymy/phrastic heteronimy. Within this theoretical frame, two of the objectives of our approach aimed at emphasizing those religious terms which are most prolific in the paremiological field, respectively the degree in which the mentioned paremiological patterns are illustrative for the revelation of certain religious themes versus the lay ones, as well as the limits of a possible dichotomy in that respect. Even though the similarities between the two Romance languages are evident (see, in that sense, the subcategory of the proverbs presenting biblical phrastic equivalents and/or those of Latin origin), our research allowed us to point out several distinctive features. Thus, in a series of cases, we could talk of imperfect interlinguistic consistencies, a concept that holds water by taking into account the selection of certain particular syntactic schemes in each of these two Romance languages, as well as by opting for different lexical ways of rendering the same mental representation, ways that we defined within the terms of discursive synonymy. Following this point, in accordance with the results of the undertaken research, Romanian is characterized by a relatively higher diversity of the registered phrastic structures, as well as by a superior representation of the phrastic variants which use religious terms.