Formulaic Diction in the 16th century Hungarian Epic

Formulaic Diction in the 16th century Hungarian Epic

Papp, Judit

The epic song (históriás ének) is the most prevalent and representative expression of the Hungarian poetry of the 16th century, and it was intended to be recited with musical accompaniment. During the second half of the century these epic songs (rewritings of antique texts, short stories and novels written in verse) were performer at the noble courts where the audience was still inexperienced in literature and well disposed towards the oral communication. These songs were stylistically made according to the expectations of that audience: they contain a remarkable quantity of formulaic iterations and constructions, repeated locutions, etc. even if the rhetorical structure of these texts slowly surpasses the limits of the formulaic style. The corpus of the Hungarian historical songs of the 16th century contains about 185 texts of different length and metrical structure and it is composed by (1) történeti énekek (songs on past historical events) further divided in tudósító énekek (songs on contemporary events) and krónikás énekek (chronicles), (2) vallásos históriák (religious songs, mostly rewritings of Bible stories), and (3) széphistóriák (romances). The aim of my current research on Hungarian historical songs concerns the analysis of all of the poems’ repetitions and formulas and their distribution, and what I’d like to present in occasion of the FLTAL 2012 conference is the first results of my computer-aided analysis of a choice of songs to reveal, analyze and categorize the forms of repetitions in this specific corpus.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05

883