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Abstract

The paper undertakes a linguistic and statistical analysis of the transit of the 21st century Russian poetic language of young poets in time, compared to the 19th-20th centuries language of outstanding poets, and in space, compared to Russian poets from other countries.

Twenty-four Russian poets from the 21st century from Russia and other countries have been chosen by four members of independent jury, representative samples of their poetry have been collected as well. From these samples the vocabulary, number of all tokens, and the most commonly used types and lexemes are determined. By Prof. G. Kjetsaa’s methods thematic, key lexemes and lexical norms are found for 21st century poets from Russia and, separately, for poets from other countries.

PTB (Pushkin-Tsvetaeva-Brodsky) approach is proposed for assessing the transit of lexemes in time. The found lexemes are compared in time with the lexemes of outstanding Russian poets of the 19th and 20th centuries. 

In space, lexemes were compared with the most commonly used lexemes of Russian poets living in a different language environment: in the Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Israel.

These comparisons show the transit and change of Russian poetic language in time and space: the most commonly used lexemes appeared among all tokens of 21st century poets and those that faded. 

It is confirmed that the dependency of the size of the vocabulary on the number of all tokens found earlier for Russian poets of the 19th and 20th century remain. This allows to evaluate the vocabulary of contemporary poets which have not been selected for the analyzed samples and to compare them with poets from other times and countries.

This research has been conducted in the framework of preparations for the philological project “Russian-language poetry in transit”, University of Trier, Germany. 

Key words

Contemporary Russian poets of the 21st century, quantitative analysis of poetic language, language transit, statistical linguistic, prevalence, vocabulary, tokens, types, lexical norms, key lexemes, language energy, PTB-approach.