Repetition in Homeric epic: Cognitive and linguistic perspectives

Abstract

Why are there so many instances - and so many varieties - of repetition in the oral epics that we associate with Homer's name? In this paper I begin with Deborah Tannen's observations on repetition in spontaneous conversational discourse. I then turn to the oral epic tradition that had flourished in early Greece to consider how repetition operates in its two representative poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey.