Abstract
The goal of this research is the quantitative analysis of frequency ranks of nouns (lexemes) in the language of three of the most outstanding and productive Russian poets from three different epochs – A. Pushkin, M. Tsvetaeva and J. Brodsky (PTB) – and Russian poets from the first two decades of the 21st century. The ranks of the twenty most commonly used nouns by PTB in the language of fourteen poets of the 21st century are found and the PTB-approach to comparing ranks in time is proposed.
It is shown which lexemes in the two centuries between Pushkin and today have vanished from the most commonly used and which other lexemes, on the contrary, increased their rank. The core lexemes which remain among the twenty most commonly used noun lexemes in the Russian poetic language are determined.
The twenty most commonly used nouns in the poetic language of Pushkin are compared with the most commonly used lexemes by the poets of three following epochs and their difference as well as their intersection is found.
It is shown which lexemes appear more often in Pushkin’s poetic language than in his prose, journalistic works, and letters, and their frequency ranks are established. The list of most commonly used nouns by the poet from the «Frequency dictionary of Pushkin’s language» is efined and completed. The way the transit of the language of a poet during the years of his life and different periods of his work is exposed.
This research has been conducted in the framework of preparations for the second part of the philological project “Russian-language poetry in transit”, University of Trier, Germany.
Key words
Transit, nouns, quantitative analysis, Russian poetic language, frequency, rank, lexem, token, type, Pushkin, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky (PTB), PTB-approach, core of poetic language, dictionary, concordance.