Oral Folk Poetry and Language Functions in Castilian Tradition

Popular Oral Poetry

Since ancient times, people have celebrated with songs the most important moments of personal, family, and community life — births, love, death, etc. These songs were transmitted orally, i.e., passed from mouth to mouth until, in later times, literate collectors, seduced by their beauty, wrote them down and published them in books. In Castilian literature, the oldest songs date from the Middle Ages and were collected from the sixteenth century.

Characteristics of Orally Transmitted Poetry

Orally transmitted folk poetry is characterized by simplicity of form and structure and by intense emotion. It captures feelings of joy, fear, anguish, and the zest for life that accompany people in their daily lives. It uses simple stanzas suitable for singing; in Castilian literature, the carol and the romance have been used particularly. Its literary language often employs parallelism, metaphor, and symbolism.

Types of Oral-Transmission Poems

Orally transmitted folk poetry is very varied. There are short compositions — love poems often consist of a few lines — but longer poems have also been preserved. The romances, for example, are narrative poems that tell a story. Characters appear briefly and take center stage in an action-filled drama with intense dialogue in direct speech.

Oral-transmission poetry is a significant expression of village life and contains deep knowledge of human feelings.

Types of Arguments

• Cause: They establish a causal relationship between facts.
• Authority: They cite the words of an expert.
• Exemplification: They offer concrete experiences that demonstrate the thesis.
• Logic: These are arguments based on reason and coherent inference.
• Emotive: They appeal to emotions and feelings to try to convince.

Language Functions

• Representative function: Language used to provide objective information and represent reality.
• Emotive function: The sender uses language to focus on themselves and express their feelings.
• Phatic function: The sender uses language to check whether the communication channel works, to open or close it.
• Poetic function: The sender concentrates on the message and produces language that is surprising and attracts attention.
• Metalinguistic function: The sender uses language to talk about the code itself (language about language).