This chapter reviews the main claims of the book concerning formularity, meter, and dialect, as well as a theory of Homeric creativity, and outlines some possible future research directions.

This chapter covers the general features of the Homeric hexameter and the most famous debates therein, before asking the more general question as to what was the usefulness of meter for oral-traditional poets. Section 1 introduces the metrical scheme of the hexameter (including incisions and bridges), the principles of scansion and syllabification. Section 2 explores the colometry of the hexameter, and introduces the prosodic hierarchy. It also employs intonational data to argue tha the Homeric hexameter coincided with an intonational phrase, and its cola mostly with phonological phrases, and provides a new prosodic account of enjambement in Homer. Section 3 covers previous attempt at establishing the historical origin of the hexameter, arguing that the account of Kiparsky 2018 is the most promising. Section 4 looks at the speech of professional sportscasters, and argues that it shows several types of prosodic regularization that is akin to a basic type of meter. Extensive prosodic regularization diminishes the options available to a speaker, making it easier to sustain high levels of fluency. Meter arguably fulfilled a similar task in oral-traditional composition in performance.

Formularity, or the poet’s reliance on prefabricated linguistic features in the composition of his verses, has been the most debated feature of Oral-Formulaic Theory. This chapter reviews the history of Homeric formularity (Part 1), while introducing new key insights from the fields of linguistics (esp. usage-based linguistics, corpus linguistics, and language acquisition studies) and the cognitive sciences (Parts 2-5). Parts 2-3 argue that formularity is a general feature of human language and cognition. Homer’s formularity is quantitatively notable, however, in that it involves sequences that are particularly long when compared to repeated sequences in corpora of both contemporary written or spoken English and ancient prose and hexameter authors. This is interpreted as a sign of Homer’s extreme mastery of his medium, which was arguably necessitated by the oral-improvisational nature of the task. Part 4 develops a new theory of Homeric formularity, borrowing insights from connectionism, lexical priming, and construction grammar, and introduces fine-grained distinctions between conceptual associations, collocations, constructions, metrical constructions and structural formulas.

This chaper looks at the peculiar mixture of linguistic forms that are archaic and dialectal in Homer and compares them to the hybrid dialects that are employed in English-language popular music today. Sections 1 and 2 provide a detailed account of the main linguistic features of Homer’s Kunstsprache and separates its archaic components from its dialectal components. Section 3 looks at perceptions of dialect (and dialect imitations) in Archaic Greece. Sections 4-5 illustrate how ancient and modern critics interpreted Homer’s dialect, and introduces phase theory, along with remaining open questions therein. Section 6 introduces several contemporary case studies of singers adopting a non-native, hybrid dialect of English when performing. These include Adele, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Green Day, Alesha Dixon, the Arctic Monkeys, Iggy Azalea, and Keith Urban. Lessons won from these case studies are then applied to Homer.

This chapter develops a theory of Homeric creativity that is informed by both contemporary cognitive studies and by ancient ideas about poetic craft and divine inspiration, as seen through the lenses of archaic poetry and Plato’s Ion. Sections 1-2 survey the conceptions of the poet as a craftsman vs. divinely inspired in Homer, Hesiod, Archilochus, Pindar, Democritus, and Plato. Section 3 introduces the modern study of creativity in the field of cognitive psychology, the study of jazz improvisation, and the concept of flow. Section 4 introduces the neuroscience of improvisation, including recent fMRI studies on jazz and lyric improvisation. The results of these studies (pointing to a state of hypofrontality when carrying out complex improvisational tasks) are compatible with some ancient ideas on creativity and inspiration (such as the idea that an external source - like the Muses- might be involved in these creative acts).

Homer’s technique of oral composition is highly traditional and tightly regulated, to the point that it presents us with a paradox: how can Homer be regarded as such a great poet, when so much of what he did was not original, but mechanical? While past critics have argued that Homer achieved greatness despite the mechanicity of his technique (and thus trascended it), this book explores the hypothesis that the mechanicity of the technique (and particularly the formal features of formularity, meter, and dialect) should be seen as adaptive features that enabled Homer’s greatness.