Abstract
The “oral-formulaic theory” of Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord has influenced hundreds of stylistic studies of Homeric and medieval epic verse. Lord's original quantitative analysis of a short sample of oral folk poetry recorded in the field in Yugoslavia has assumed undue importance, obscuring Parry's and Lord's sensitive account of the complex phenomenon of repetitive poetic diction. No statistical basis has been established for a distinct quantitative threshold of formula density, above which only the work of an oral poet can reach. Rigorous analysis of significant amounts of data requires the development of automatic lemmatization for Serbo-Croatian, and perhaps of a new mathematical model as well.
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