The term “immanence” or “traditional referentiality” denotes the ability of formulaic components in oral poetry ‒ such as epithets, formulaic phrases, and type-scenes ‒ to convey meaning that they acquire from traditional usage rather than from the definitions of the words they comprise. When oral poets repeatedly use a formulaic structure in contexts that bear some thematic resemblance to each other, the formula comes to be associated with that unifying theme and can then evoke it when redeployed in a new context.