NIVELE INFRASTILISTICE ÎN BALADA POPULARĂ ROMÂNEASCĂ
INFRA-STYLISTIC LEVELS WITHIN THE ROMANIAN POPULAR BALLAD

Summary/Abstract: The popular art encompasses the very concentrated essences of the Romanian people’s spiritual life. L. Blaga supports the idea of a personal rhythm of each and every people and this internal rhythm has put pressure on versification. That is why the Romanian popular verse is made of stressed and unstressed syllables, one by one, as the rhythm of hill and valley. C. Brăiloiu points out that the Romanian peasants use, with small exceptions, only two types of verses: the octo-syllable and the hexa-syllable, and two of their variants: hepta- and penta-syllable. This structure is so powerful that it involves the change of the ‘natural’ stress of the words. Another aspect that we looked at is the rhyme. The importance and the simplicity of the rhyme of the popular poems, especially of the ballad, were noticed by N. Iorga, too. A very important level that we studied is the lexical-semantic level. The plasticity of the popular vocabulary is linked to a series of lexical procedures, constructions and figures of speech. We pointed out several aspects among which the use of the archaic vocabulary in carols and ballads, the regional words and the borrowings which create a special poetic language and environment. Last, but not least, the morphological-syntactic level was taken into consideration. One of the most frequent syntactic figures in the Romanian ballade is the periphrasis, used to embellish the oral ‘story’. The person who told/recited the ballad had a great memory and a good technique of invention, too. He interferes creatively in his text, being able to hold his listeners’ attention and make them ‘feel’ the story. In conclusion, the ballad is a complex architecture, unique within the popular literature, although it is a sum of all the features of the species of the popular literature.

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