Sarali Gintsburg is my new Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Fellow

Sarali Gintsburg (PhD in Humanities University of Tilburg, Lic. Phil. Arabic Language and Islamic Studies University of Helsinki, MA & BA Arabic Language and Islamic Studies University of Saint Petersburg) is a lecturer at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, where she has been responsible for courses in Arabic language & literature, anthropology, and cultural studies. She is an affiliated researcher at Babylon (Center for the Study of Superdiversity, Tilburg University) and at the Institut de Recherches et d'Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM, Aix-en-Provence).

Her doctoral and postdoctoral research constitute the first analysis of the density, frequency, and usage of formulas in the transitional compositions of a living oral tradition (the Jbala of Northern Morocco). The results challenge widely accepted hypotheses about formulaic density constituting the main indicator for the oral nature of a text. The compositional techniques of Jbala singers were shown to have a complex relationship with writing, and literacy did not always decrease their use of formulaic expressions. Sarali analyzed the practices of the Jbala singers, their appreciation of their own work, and its reception by their audiences during a series of campaigns of anthropological fieldwork. The data also led to important questions about our general knowledge of the formulaic nature of language and its cognitive underpinnings, and exposed a complex interplay between formulaic language, novel contemporary expressions, and hybrid expressions that built on the traditional patterns by recombining them or by inserting new elements into their phrasal slots.

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Here is a summary of ORFORCREA:

ORFORCREA. Locked between formulas: creativity in oral and transitional poetic texts

The human mind is capable of creativity and innovation unparalleled by any other species. At the same time, human beings elaborate and preserve complex and highly-stable traditions, transmitting them over very long time spans by means of the spoken word and through a variety of technologies, such as writing. How does human cognition give rise to such complex manifestations as oral poetic performance, and how are they affected by the introduction of writing? ORFORCREA investigates the cognitive basis of creativity in verbal art, examining its interplay with both oral tradition and literacy.

How can we approach as intricate a problem as verbal creativity with manageable, but at the same time ecologically valid and culturally situated data? While everyday human speech is extremely complex for analysis and has vast lexical and phraseological resources, the language material in oral traditions is typically organized in narrower terms, with idiomaticity enhanced because of poetic requirements, such as the constraints of the poetic line, rhyme patterns, plots, or themes, as well as form-meaning normativity (validity of a given expression within its poetic tradition). The cognitive study of phrasal and grammatical structures in oral poetic traditions is thus comparable to working in a ‘natural’ lab, where the linguistic material, selected throughout long diachronies and innumerable performances, ideally fits the purpose of examining the creative use of formulaic resources. Thus ORFORCREA targets the essential feature of oral poetic traditions, idiomaticity, seeking to produce insights about the formulaic nature of language in general.

ORFORCREA focuses on the ability to generalize or create new phrases and meanings by using pre-fabricated, fixed or semi-fixed lexical chunks . According to cognitive linguistics, this reflects our general capacity for instance-based generalization, which prompts us to manipulate and recombine existing patterns, including non-linguistic categories. To get a fuller access to the mechanisms that condition the choices and creation of these chunks, ORFORCREA works with ‘irregular’ samples, that is, with those poetic texts that represent a transition from orality to the world of writing. As of today, the general understanding expressed by both linguists and literary scholars is that although oral and written modes are not mutually exclusive in terms of human cognitive abilities, there are still major differences between them. By studying linguistic irregularities and their patterns in transitional texts and comparing them across languages, ORFORCREA will demonstrate to what extent such differences will have an impact on traditional poetic composition.

ORFORCREA will compare the following traditions: (1) Medieval Arabic poetry, (2) Medieval French chansons de geste, (3) oral epics from former Yugoslavia, collected during the 19th - first half of the 20th century by Parry & Lord and others, and (4) the still living oral tradition of the Jbala (Morocco), collected and analyzed by Gintsburg and Moscoso. The latter tradition will also serve as an in-depth case study for this project.

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