“Said a Word, Uttered Thus”: Structures and Functions of Parallelism in Arhippa Perttunen’s Poems

Verse parallelism is one of the most distinctive features of a Finnic tradition of oral poetry, which is called “kalevalaic poetry” in Finland or “regilaul” in Estonia. This essay presents grammatical and semantic principles and patterns according to which parallel verses are composed, and introduces a statistical analysis of parallelism in the repertoire of one singer of these poems. Verse parallelism is considered a constitutive feature which, alongside the meter and alliteration, defines this register. As the first line has normally the full referential power of a proposition, parallel lines add to this power and deepen and enrich description in the discourse.