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Kanni Labi. Expressing Motion in Runo Songs |
2006, nr. 7 |
This paper examines motion verbs used as parallel
words in runo songs and the expression of motion in parallelism.
The material analysed represents historical and poetic language,
the age of which varies from the origin of runo songs about 2000
years ago, to the end of the 19th century, when most of the songs
were written down. The poetical features which most affect the
semantics of runo song language are alliteration and parallelism.
The main unit of parallelism is a group of verses, each organized
by alliteration, expressing a same or similar situation, using
same, synonymous or analogous words. The aim of repeating one
idea with different words and the coherence between parallel verses
causes that generally non-synonymous words may come to be used
as synonymous parallel words. The main category of motion in runo
songs seems to be change of location, with a certain emphasis
on the deictic direction: the deictic verbs tulema 'to
come' and minema 'to go' are seldom used together. In the
domain of deictically definite motion there are rare uses of more
generic verbs (as liikuma 'to move') and frequent uses
of more specific words to code the manner or medium of the motion,
while their specific meaning is eliminated. In addition the material
reveals some historically older meanings (saama 'to get'
< 'to come') and some geographical differences of the language
use.
Keywords: semantics, folkloristics,
dialectology.
Kanni Labi (b. 1971), MA, Estonian Literary
Museum, the Department of Ethnomusicology, researcher
kanni@haldjas.folklore.ee
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