3. Narrative Style and Discourse in Kurdish and Neo-Aramaic Oral Literature

This chapter is an overview of narrative style and discourse strategies in Kurdish and Neo-Aramaic oral literature, show-casing convergence in storytelling techniques among ethno-religiously distinct neighbouring communities. Kurdish and Neo-Aramaic narrative discourse shows parallels in poetic, formulaic and figurative language as well as in its structural organisation. The chapter also contextualises these hallmarks from an areal perspective. Examples have been taken from the collection of texts in the second volume and include shared opening and closing formulae, idioms, fillers, proverbs, ideo-phones, onomatopoeias as well as syntactic stylistics such as repetition, inversion, and narrative verbal forms. The organi-sation of discourse is similar in the use of repetition and tail-head linkage for event cohesion, thematisation etc., the use of the verb ‘to rise’ to serve as discourse connective, the functions of additive particles, as well zero anaphora. A few features, such as the use of the additive markers, are typical of Aramaic-Kurdish bilinguals and indicative of Kurdish influence on Ar-amaic, while the use of verb ‘to rise’ in Kurdish indicates the influence of Semitic on Kurdish. Several traits are shared also more widely with Armenian, Arabic (Levantine, Mesopotami-an), Iranian (Gorani, Persian), and Turkic (Turkish, Azeri). Other features, the opening and closing formulae in particular, have been subject to diffusion in an area spanning from Iran to Eastern Europe. Finally, a number of these techniques. e.g., repetition, sound symbolism, are characteristics of oral narra-tives in general.