El refrán como estrategia comunicativa: (des)codificación del sentido y función pragmático-discursiva

The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive, theoretical overview of how proverbs are used as a communicative and discursive strategy, taking into account the speaker’s communicative intention. I will pay attention both to the benefits of the use of this type of formulaic sequence in the construction of the speech, and to the illocutionary force and pragmatic implications entailed by these utterances. In order to do so, some considerations will be required – the encoding of the meaning of the proverbs, the decoding process by the addressee, and the way proverbs are inserted in the discourse. This paper inspects the importance of such factors as the need for articulation of fluent speech, the assumption of cultural patterns, the appeal to proverbiality that aligns the speaker with power structures of the community, or the masking of the speaker’s voice behind a collective entity in order to socialize and release tensions related to interpersonal contact.