Formulaic creativity: Oral Poetics and CogSci
For the updated version of this project see FORMULEARN at the Daedalus Lab
M. Parry and A.B. Lord showed that oral epic singers compose complex poems not by remembering a fixed text, but by improvising their song as they perform. This technique, known as composition-in-performance, is based on the mastery of formulae, fixed expressions regularly used under certain metrical and discursive conditions (e.g. “swift footed Achilles”), themes, typical scenes that structure the narrative (e.g. the assembly), and story-patterns, basic plots (e.g. the return of the hero). The mental feats accomplished by epic singers are very relevant for the study of memory, semantics, pragmatics, and other fields. In fact, usage-based and cognitive linguistics share their methodological and theoretical foundations with Parry-Lord inspired oral poetics. With collaborators, I compare Homer, oral epic poetry in Serbo-Croatian, and other traditions, focusing on:
Instance-based learning, in first language acquisition and epic singing, which are both essentially natural, unschooled processes.
Idiomatic-phraseological units. The phraseology and poetics of form-meaning pairs: formulae and grammatical constructions.
Traditional-cognitive episodic structures. Conventionalized sets of encyclopedic knowledge: themes, story-patterns, scripts, and conceptual frames.
Multimodality and performativity. Techniques for guiding the audience's mental imagery as the story unfolds, which rely on our capacities for spatial cognition and mental simulation, and are shared by modern media such as cinema or television: zooming in and out, viewpoint shifts and compressions, foregrounding, and many more.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS:
Antović, M. & Pagán Cánovas, C. Forthcoming. Not dictated by metrics: Function words in the speech introductions of South-Slavic oral epic. Language and Communication.
Pagán Cánovas, C. & Antović, M. 2016. Formulaic creativity: Oral poetics and cognitive grammar. Language and Communication 47. 66-74.
Pagán Cánovas, C. & Antović, M. 2016. Introduction: Oral poetics and cognitive science. In C. Pagán Cánovas and M. Antović (eds.) Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science. 1-11. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Pagán Cánovas, C. & Antović, M. 2016. Construction grammar and oral formulaic theory. In C. Pagán Cánovas and M. Antović (eds.) Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science. 79-98. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Towards a Cognitive Oral Poetics: Traditional Epic and Cognitive Linguistics (in collaboration with Professor Mihailo Antović, from the University of Niš, Serbia). Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, FRIAS Tandem Fellowship in Linguistics and Literary Studies.
Press report about our project
Our conference: ORAL POETICS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE
We are editing a volume with contributions from speakers at the conference and from other leading researchers in the relevant fields, to be submitted to the FRIAS Linguae & Litterae Series in De Gruyter.
This project was awarded the Tandem Fellowship in linguistics and literary studies from the LiLi School of the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Study (FRIAS). We worked at FRIAS from October 1, 2012 to March 31, 2013. We gave a related presentation at DGKL 5, the Fifth Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association.
Our project combines our expertise in classics, Homeric studies, cognitive poetics, cognitive linguistics, musicolinguistics, and Serbo-Croatian linguistics to lay the foundations of a cognitive oral poetics. We seek to integrate cognitive linguistics with the comparative oral poetics of Homer, epic poetry in Serbo-Croatian, and medieval epics in modern Greek, Spanish, or French.
Our main interest is to connect the mechanisms of meaning construction detected by oral poetics scholars to research on language and cognition. We focus on
the application of cognitive grammar and conceptual mappings research to the analysis of formulaic diction
the contrastive study of spatial cognition patterns in idiomatic expressions, from both oral epics and everyday language
We expect our research to produce two major theoretical-methodological innovations:
We will establish the foundations of cognitive oral poetics, with implications for many areas in cognitive science and linguistics.
We will contribute to the enquiry about the origins of music, language and song as products of higher order cognition.