context and practice are not universally consistent: lullabies can be performed seated while cradling the infant in the lap, as in samoa, or by the parents swinging the child slowly in an arc between them, as with the ewe of west africa. as regards the purpose of lullabies, those of the hazara of afghanistan, for example, are categorized as either 'functional' or 'stylized'; the former are sung by women to put small children to sleep, the latter by men for entertainment, often accompanied by a dambura (two-string fretless lute). they may also have more than one function: for the hazara, lullabies not only send the child to sleep but can also act as a signal to the singer's lover. in the sub-arctic algonkian area, the bebe ataushu repertory is predominantly private, women's music. for the navajo, lullabies are one of a number of non-ceremonial types of traditional song. in italy, lullabies have been classified as magical (directly involving sleep), erotic (explicit love songs) or di sfogo ('outlet', 'venting'), in which the female singer laments her own or the human condition. textual analysis of japanese lullabies suggests a close connection between the manner of performance of lullabies and magic. textual formulae and refrains can be used, like 'fatta la ninna' ('rock-a-bye') in italian lullabies, to ward off evil and invoke divine help, and can vary, in the vowel set of the refrain, within regions of a country such as spain. they can cross cultural boundaries, as in 'ninna-nanna' (italy), 'nani, nani' (albania), and 'ljulja nina' (bosnia-hercegovina). formulae appear again in the imagery and repeated diminutives of a zuñi lullaby ('little boy, little cotton-tail, little jack-rabbit, little rat'), and melodically, in the same lullaby, with a range of just two notes. the hazara texts contain the sounds 'lalai' or 'lalu' along with the interjection of terms of endearment such as 'my sweet' or 'my eyes'. the sound effects of the lullaby sometimes take precedence over meaning, with words being deliberately altered to produce assonant, mellifluous sounds. lullabies among the tuareg differ from other women´s songs in their more supple style, the use of semitones and a dissymmetric structure subordinate to the demands of improvised texts. the melody invariably moves within a fairly narrow range of a 4th or 5th, but can have, as in norway, great melodic and rhythmic flexibility within a few common formulae.