Presentation Formulas in South Slavic Epic Song

Ever since the pathfinding fieldwork of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, South Slavic oral epic song has supplied one of the principal points de repère for scholars interested in the study of oral, especially epic, traditions.¹ Parry traveled to the Balkans in the 1930s in search of a "living laboratory" in which to test his ideas about the oral and traditional nature of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. He found among the Slavic-speaking inhabitants of then-Yugoslavia a tradition that was remarkably similar to Homeric poetry in terms of both form and content. The Muslim communities concentrated in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Sandžak region of Serbia and Montenegro had developed a particularly rich repertoire of songs describing battles and raids along the Ottoman frontier of the recent or remote past. Parry, however, was interested less in the content of the songs than in their formal features and the techniques of their production. He embarked on an ambitious project of collecting audio recordings and written records intended to document as fully as possible these formal and technical aspects of the tradition. Lord, Parry's student and assistant in the field from 1934-35, continued this project with subsequent fieldwork in the 1950s and '60s. Their recordings and texts—which number in the thousands and are today conserved in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard University—allowed these two scholars to identify and describe phenomena that have been recognized as characterizing numerous oral traditions worldwide, principally the phenomenon of "composition-in-performance," by which is meant the technique of performing narrative through manipulation of traditional themes as expressed in traditional verbal formulas, without reference to a fixed text.

The phenomenon I intend to examine in this essay is likewise common to very many oral traditions, and for that reason it may at first glance appear to be unremarkable. Like performers in diverse other traditions, the singers of South Slavic epic frequently have occasion to address their audiences directly in the course of performance. It is not readily apparent whether these appeals to the listener—which are accomplished, as we shall see, by means of very short, relatively inconspicuous expressions—have any function beyond simply inviting the audience to experience a sense of participation in the performance. I will argue, however, that patterns of direct address in fact have an important discursive function, at least within the corpus of songs I have selected for examination. Appeals to the listener serve as cues that guide listeners' perceptions of narrated events and assist them in tracking points of articulation in the song.

Methods and Theory

My analysis is based on the epic idiolect of Halil Bajgorić, a Muslim from the Stolac district in Herzegovina, from whom Parry and Lord collected a number of songs.² Bajgorić uses a set of recurring expressions to direct his audience's attention to particular characters or events in his narrative. The most important of these is the expression kad evo ti, which has a number of formulaic variants. This expression translates approximately into English as "when—here you are." Its normal usage can be illustrated with the following lines from Bajgorić's song Ženidba Bećirbega Mustajbegova (The Wedding of Mustajbey's Son Bećirbey, PN 6699, ll. 181-84):³

sidje Djulić na avliju kletupa otvori na avliji vratakad evo ti careve gazijena doratu konju kosatome

Djulić goes down to the accursed courtyardand opens the courtyard gates,when—here you are!—the sultan's heroon his long-maned bay horse.⁴

Kad is the subordinating conjunction "when," which links the expression to its syntactic context. Ti is the dative of the second personal pronoun, "you," and evo is a proximal deictic marker, something like Italian ecco. It is deictic because it points to something available to the perception of the addressee—deixis means "pointing"—and it is proximal because it points to something that is near rather than far.⁵ Both evo and ti encode in themselves a direct appeal to the addressee. Evo ti is an expression one would use when presenting someone with...