Similarity and contrast as structuring principles in the Latvian Daina Quatrain
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11263797 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Vaira Vikis-Freibergs (Université de Montréal, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 201-226 |
| Publication date | 1999-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Baltic Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0162-9778 • E-ISSN: 1751-7877 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/01629779900000071 |
| OpenAlex | W1969802497 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
Becoming stylized meta-language the carrier of an which oral uses poetic natural tradition language means for acquiring its raw a s lized meta-language which uses natural l nguage for its ra materials, this acquisition being in many ways analogous to the learning of the mother-tongue (Rubin; Vīķis-Freibergs, 1984). Poetry differs from everyday prose by submitting to additional constraints, which in the case of traditional poetiy are metric as well as phonetic and stylistic (Mukařovský, 1977). These additional constraints have been variously termed, being seen either as overlay systems (Zwicky, 1 986) or as rulebound registers of speech (Foley, 1992). The Latvian folk song or daina follows either one of two strictly defined metric frames, the trochaic or the dactylic. In the case of songs in the trochaic meter, which form by far the largest majority of the daina corpus, this frame consists of lines of octosyllabic blank verse divided by a caesura, grouped into pairs of couplets which constitute the canonical unit of the daina quatrain. The tradition thus imposes a totally rigid metrical form into which the semantic content of the text has to be poured and within the frame of which all aesthetic devices must operate. The metrical mold of the daina quatrain is like an iron corset that cannot be loosened, for as soon as one departs from it, the result no longer sounds like a genuine daina. While the metric frame is an obligatory feature of the tradition, which one is not at liberty to change, it is not so much restrictive as it is supportive, since it aids considerably in the construction as well as the retention of a metrically correct song text. A similar role may be attributed to a whole repertoire of optional devices in song construction, which offer a technical support system to the folk poet, something like a tool kit from which the required tool may be chosen as required, or again, like a poetic bag of tricks from which different possible ones may be pulled at will. Skill in making use of such optional devices is largely what distinguishes talented folk poets from mediocre ones and accounts for the wide range in quality that is exhibited in any large folk corpus. With respect to the Latvian dainas, an impressive proportion of these short, laconic and misleadingly simple texts turn out to embody intellectual structures and poetic devices of great complexity and sophistication. Given the unmoveable outer boundary of the metric
Art · Feature (linguistics · Frame (networking · Linguistics · Literature · Modality (human–computer interaction · Natural (archaeology · Poetry · Computer Science · European Linguistics and Anthropology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy · Artificial Intelligence
| Highly cited | No |
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