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This thesis is a study of the proverbs of the nmampurusi in Northern Ghana. The Imampuruli language belongs to the Mole-Dagbani group. The power of the chiefdom of nmampurugu was greater than it is now, and is still declining. This work first tries to assess the importance of oral art and especially of proverbs in African culture. There follows the discussion of practical fieldwork methodology and some linguistic notes on the vernacular in which the collection has been made. The collection itself is a selection from 4,000 proverbs, leaving out repetitions and variants. It gives the vernacular text with a free translation, and more or less detailed explanations to show the meaning and possible context of each proverb. There are cross references and indications of frequency of occurence. The last part is devoted to a commentary on the collection. The main conclusion is that, because of the basically dynamic nature of the proverbs, no static analysis can ever be adequate. Consequently the work provides some preliminary indications towards a discovery of generative rules operating in proverbs within the semantic, structural, social and valuational dimensions, with examples from the text. The conclusion is that these proverbs cannot be studied in a detached way but that one must enter into dialogue with them.

Chaque langue possède une série de pensées ordinaires, comme une sorte de mémoire de tradition intériorisée. Le proverbe ouvre une fenêtre sur la conscience collective d’une communauté, sa mentalité, ses habitudes et ses traditions sans oublier son contexte géographique.Les proverbes sont là depuis toujours, et dans toutes les civilisations. Ils étaient même rapprochés des lois ou des textes religieux, un des livres de la Bible est justement intitulé Livre des Proverbes. Même si cela n’a rien à voir avec les proverbes que tout le monde connait actuellement, on ne peut pas nier le fait que les proverbes sont chargés de transmettre une expérience ancienne. Ils sont cités par les grands philosophes et écrivains de tous les temps : les sophistes à Athènes, les rhéteurs à Rome confirmaient l’intérêt de la culture savante pour les proverbes populaires. C’est justement cet intérêt qui a incité à faire des recueils de proverbes dans de très nombreux pays. Les proverbes font leur entrée partout, dans l’espace professionnel et domestique, ou lors d’une conversation entre amis. En d’autres termes, la fréquence de leur utilisation au quotidien est élevée. Ainsi représentent-ils une approche profonde d’une culture étrangère en nous permettant de découvrir de nombreux aspects culturels de tel ou tel pays et également de faire une comparaison avec nos propres proverbes. Avec le temps et l’évolution des sciences, la question des formes sentencieuses et notamment celle du proverbe a commencé à connaître une faveur particulière dans différentes sciences humaines intéressées aux faits de langage. Les anthropologues, les sociologues, les folkloristes les ont pris comme objet d’étude. / The proverb, a simple but at the same time enigmatic linguistic form, is the one of the oldest genres. This is a form of the oral speech existing in all cultures of the world. The use of proverbs in the spoken language enriches the speech, and their illocutionary power in human communication is still striking. Proverbs have long been neglected by linguists, as in the course of time they were considered as frozen expressions and have not arose any particular interest in terms of language.This research paper emphasizes the study of linguistic, particularly semantic influence of proverbs in the oral speech; our task is the study of specific features of proverbs in French and Azerbaijani and their comparison. The first part of the paper is actually theoretical. During examination of various issues, specifically metaphoricalness, semantics, argumentation, and universality as well as artistic and cultural aspects of the mode, there are revealed the definitive and prototypical features of the proverbial speech.The second part is devoted to the comparative analysis of French and Azerbaijani proverbs from the perspective of intercultural parmioligy. The comparison was carried out mainly at the syntactic and semantic levels and applied to two lists of proverbs (chapters I-III). In the fourth and final chapter entitled « Problems of translation and equivalence » is researched the possibility of obtaining of a semantic equivalence in the analysis of paremies in various working languages. We therefore had recourse to use of images - the linguistic means which bring to light a number of representations of an extra-linguistic reality. The paper ends with the conclusion of the research; an attachment including two detailed lists of Azerbaijani and French proverbs and a bibliography containing the articles, papers and web sites referred to.