ИСТИНА

The structures of verbless sentences forming Mazandaranian paroemias (Ansari M. Farhang-e zarb-ol-masalhā-ye māzandarāni, 2011) are mainly based on ellipsis. The language of proverbs tends to be particularly succinct: the idea is expressed in fewer words than in regular discourse. Lack of the verb heightens the style of statements, distancing them from everyday colloquial speech. The deviation of the style of proverbs from that of everyday speech draws the attention of the interlocutor, making him focus on the message of the speaker, while giving more weight to the speaker’s pronouncement. A number of patterns are revealed in verbless phraseology. Some nominal parts of speech have so called “built-in predicativity”, and therefore do not combine with personal forms of the verb. These include the words: kū? ‘where’?, in-am ‘here’, etc. In these units the first judgement opposes the second. Within complex phrases, components are connected by the coordinating enclitic conjunction or have no formal connection at all. In many polypredicative paroemias, the first sentence includes the predicate expressed in the personal form of the verb, while the second one is an elliptical sentence with a truncated verb (so called gaping). Most aphorisms, from the point of view of their information structure, represent thetic sentences with unmarked theme and data, which are not explicitly articulated.