ONCE AGAIN ABOUT THE RESEARCH POTENTIAL OF THE POETIC CORPUS: METER, VOCABULARY, FORMULA


2015. № 3 (6), 449-463

National Research University Higher School of Economics

Abstract:

The article continues the trend of other researchers’ publications that demonstrate the opportunities of the poetic subcorpus of the Russian National corpus. The question is, what issues related to the history of Russian poetry can be solved with the help of the corpus. In the first part of the article there is a pilot study of attraction of lexical units to poetic meters. The study is conducted with the use of collostructional analysis. As the test material we use “metapoetics terms” — those which are traditionally used when describing the process of creating poetry.  Almost all of them are attracted to iambic verse. The only exception is the word “trochee” that appears more frequently in trochaic lines. The second part of the article reconstructs the poetic tradition, which a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev “Last cataclysm” follows. The poem is considered as composed of a set of poetic formulas (repeated text fragments), each of them with its own history, origin and frequency in Russian poetry. Clarifying these aspects for each formula helps to represent the genesis of the whole poem and embed it in the model of perception of the contemporary reader.