Such literal readings, he says, “provide the basis on which figurative interpretations are determined.” “So special interpretative rules beyond regular compositional semantic principles are necessary to assign these proverbs even literal readings.” “Many proverbs such as Like father, like son and The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat adhere to formulas, here like X, like Y and The X-er, the Y-er, which do not conform to customary NP + VP syntactic structure,” Norrick writes. Norrick explains that proverbs like the one you’re asking about don’t adhere to the traditional use of noun phrases and verb phrases. In “Proverbs,” an essay in the Encyclopaedia of the Linguistic Sciences, the philologist Neal R. Like many other English proverbs, it doesn’t conform to the usual syntax, the arrangement of words and phrases into sentences. Q: What is the history of the phrase “like father, like son”? Does it hark back to a time when this sort of parallel construction was common?Ī: The expression “like father, like son” is an old English proverb with roots in classical Latin.

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