Relating to or having the nature of a ballad; characteristic of ballad poetry or performance.
From 'balladic' plus '-al' (another suffix meaning 'relating to' or 'of the nature of'). English sometimes stacks suffixes, as in 'balladic' + '-al'.
English allows suffix-stacking—'balladic' could have been enough, but adding '-al' made it sound more formal and scholarly, the kind of word that appears in Victorian literary criticism.
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