Fearless song

Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire, a farmer’s wife who could neither read nor write, gained great acclaim in the oral tradition from the late eighteenth century due to her exceptional abilities at song making and the uncompromising disdain for the colonial establishment expressed therein. Her compositions are most closely associated with the period from the 1820s onward when the Rockite agrarian movement was at its strongest, and when millenarian belief was widespread among members of that agrarian secret society. Her songs represent an alternative tradition of thought that lived in the elusive moment of performance itself, fostered by a rich oral culture that existed parallel to official written accounts. In this unofficial, though highly influential, sphere of idea-making, the illiterate female song poet would engage with the most pressing political concerns of her community and society, demonstrating the sheer power of song for political engagement and thought formation. Three key elements of Ní Laeire’s work and legacy will be considered herein: oral aesthetics, oral composition, and training; representations of prophecy and parrhesia in the songs themselves; and a re-appraisal of the role of the illiterate Irish-speaking female song poet in the history of anti-colonial thought and activism.

Understanding an Epic Song of the Hmong in Laos From The Perspective of Oral Composition

This article looks at an epic song performed by Hmong in Laos from a perspective of oral composition by analyzing a wedding song Leuangtengdong. Through detailed musical and textual transcription, several compositional devices are identified and discussed. My study explores oral composition of the song focusing on its material and structure. I argue that music plays an important role in its oral composition: material-wise, music functions both as formulaic music-text association/unity and by careful music-text interactions; structure-wise, the song is organized in a multi-layered framework realized by the hierarchical music-text formulas, with music-text ‘theme’ in critical structural positions.

The Role of Orality and Textuality, Folklore and Scribalism in the Historical Books

The border shared by oral-compositional sensibilities and written libretto is beautifully exemplified by the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible. Some of the pieces in this corpus such as Judges 5 are characterized by formulaic language, a mark of oral composition, and imagine settings for extemporaneous performance. The Historical Books offer numerous examples of narrative variants, alternate versions of comparable content, another indication of oral traditional style. On the other hand, the Historical Books frequently allude to written documents and seem to valorize letters, decrees, chronicles, and examples of monumental writing. These books are thus especially informative about attitudes to writing even while preserving and showing appreciation for oral style material. Reflecting upon scribal elites, their relationship to writing, and their attitudes to oral and written media relates to the recollection and creation of history itself and to the processes of cultural construction.

Learning formulaic creativity: Chunking in verbal art and speech

The chunking problem is central to linguistics, semiotics, and poetics: How do we learn to organize a language into patterns and to use those patterns creatively? Linguistics has mainly offered two answers, one based on rule inference through innate capacities for processing and the other based on usage and on outstanding capacities for memory and retrieval. Both views are based on induction and compositionality. The Parry–Lord theory of oral composition-in-performance has argued that oral singers produce complex poems out of rehearsed improvisation through the mastery of a system of formulas, chunks that integrate phrasal, metrical, and semantic structures. The framework of formulaic creativity proposed here argues that the cognitive study of oral poetics can provide crucial insights into the chunking problem. I show the major connections between Parry–Lord and usage-based cognitive linguistics, mainly Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics. However, these approaches still remain compositional and thus struggle to model creativity and learning in oral poetry and everyday speech. The alternative is to explore a model of formulaic creativity not based on compositional patterns, but on wide learning for connecting discriminative perceptual features directly to semantic contrasts within a complex dynamic system, without the intermediation of a set of discrete units.

Reduction of ureteral stent encrustation by modulating the urine pH and inhibiting the crystal film with a new oral composition: a m ulticenter, placebo controlled, double blind, randomized clinical trial

Background: Encrustation of ureteral double J stents is a common complication that may affect its removal. The aim of the proposed study is to evaluate the efficacy and safety of a new oral composition to prevent double J stent encrustation in indwelling times up to 8 weeks.Methods: A double-blinded, multicenter, placebo-controlled trial was conducted with 105 patients with indwelling double J stents enrolled across 9 public hospitals in Spain. The patients were randomly assigned (1:1) into intervention (53 patients) or placebo (52 patients) groups for 3 to 8 weeks and both groups self-monitored daily their morning urine pH levels. The primary outcome of analysis was the degree of stent ends encrustation, defined by a 4-point score (0 – none; 3 – global encrustation) using macroscopic and electron microscopy analysis of crystals, after 3 to 8-w indwelling period. Score was exponentially transformed according to calcium levels. Secondary endpoints included urine pH decrease, stent removal, and incidence of adverse events.Results: The intervention group benefits from a lower global encrustation rate of stent ends than placebo group (1% vs 8.2%; p < 0.018). Mean encrustation score was 85.12 (274.5) in the placebo group and 18.91 (102.27) in the intervention group (p < 0.025). Considering the secondary end points, treated patients reported greater urine pH decreases (p = 0.002). No differences in the incidence of adverse events were identified between the groups. Conclusions: Our data suggest that the use of this new oral composition is beneficial in the context of ureteral double J indwelling by decreasing mean, as well as global encrustation.Trial registration: This trial was registered at www.clinicaltrials.gov under the name “Combined Use of a Medical Device and a Dietary Complement in Patient Urinary pH Control in Patients With an Implanted Double J Stent” with date 2nd November 2017, code NCT03343275, and URL:https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT03343275?term=NCT03343275&draw=2&rank=1

Reduction of ureteral stent encrustation by modulating the urine pH and inhibiting the crystal film with a new oral composition: a m ulticenter, placebo controlled, double blind, randomized clinical trial

Background: Encrustation of ureteral double J stents is a common complication that may affect its removal. The aim of the proposed study is to evaluate the efficacy and safety of a new oral composition to prevent double J stent encrustation in indwelling times up to 8 weeks. Methods: A double-blinded, multicenter, placebo-controlled trial was conducted with 105 patients with indwelling double J stents enrolled across 9 public hospitals in Spain. The patients were randomly assigned (1:1) into intervention (53 patients) or placebo (52 patients) groups for 3 to 8 weeks and both groups self-monitored daily their morning urine pH levels. The primary outcome of analysis was the degree of stent ends encrustation, defined by a 4-point score (0 – none; 3 – global encrustation) using macroscopic and electron microscopy analysis of crystals, after 3 to 8-w indwelling period. Score was exponentially transformed according to calcium levels. Secondary endpoints included urine pH decrease, stent removal, and incidence of adverse events. Results: The intervention group benefits from a lower global encrustation rate of stent ends than placebo group (1% vs 8.2%; p < 0.018). Mean encrustation score was 85.12 (274.5) in the placebo group and 18.91 (102.27) in the intervention group (p < 0.025). Considering the secondary end points, treated patients reported greater urine pH decreases (p = 0.002). No differences in the incidence of adverse events were identified between the groups. Conclusions: Our data suggest that the use of this new oral composition is beneficial in the context of ureteral double J indwelling by decreasing mean, as well as global encrustation. Trial registration: This trial was registered at www.clinicaltrials.gov under the name “Combined Use of a Medical Device and a Dietary Complement in Patient Urinary pH Control in Patients With an Implanted Double J Stent” with date 2nd November 2017, code NCT03343275, and URL: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT03343275?term=NCT03343275&draw=2&rank=1 Keywords: double J stent; encrustation; nutraceutical; L-methionine; phytin; pH.