This article deals with the linguistic phenomenon usually referred to as verbersättning (“verbal substitution”) but which, in the present article, I prefer to call proverbalisering (“proverbalization”), a choice of term based on the analogy with pronominalisering, the corresponding term in the nominal sphere. However, while pronominalization has been the subject of many linguistic studies, proverbalization, despite its crucial importance to any language possessing the verb category, has received little attention in modern linguistic research.

The article analyses the use of proverbalization by means of the proverb göra in Swedish with the purpose of showing that this linguistic operation is not a specifically Swedish phenomenon but a phenomenon of great linguistic generality and that this is why a comparison with other languages will reveal that its general mechanisms are fundamentally the same in the languages compared as in Swedish.  In fact, it is argued that in Swedish, as well as in these languages, the proverb is a syntactic tool specifically designed for verb phrase representation and that, in this capacity, it satisfies an imperative need of linguistic expression. It follows that proverbalization is not subject to diachronic frequency fluctuation. Furthermore, the analysis does not support the common view that proverbalization is primarily a stylistic device for avoiding verb repetition, nor the conception of proverbalization as being a subdivision of ellipsis.