THE QUANTITATIVE GRAMMAR AND POETICS OF FINITE VERBS IN THE RUSSIAN POETIC TRADITION

The paper offers data on the quantity and structure of finite verbal forms in Simeon Polotsky’s collection Guslʹ Dobroglasnaia, twenty epinician odes by Mikhail Lomonosov and ten odes by Gavriil Derzhavin. We find about 850 finite forms in Simeon’s collection, about 2700 in the odes by Lomonosov and about 1560 in the odes by Derzhavin. The percentages of past tenses in Simeon’s, Lomonosovʼs and Derzhavinʼs texts are similar (25.1 %, 21.4 % and 23.5 %, respectively), and the same is true for the percentages of non-indicative moods (20.5 % vs. 19.1 % and 20.5 %). Simeon Polotsky’s texts contain fewer present tense forms than those written by the 18th-century poets (42.8 % vs. 50.6 % and 49.5 %), but they contain more future tense forms (11.6 % vs. 8.9 % and 6.5 %). The results are compared to data from Konstantin Batyushkovʼs Essays in Verse and Prose (without The Wanderer and The Home-Lover, ~ 1650 finite verbs), 100 poems by Alexander Pushkin (~2400 verbs), 50 poems by Mikhail Lermontov (~1000 verbs), 100 poems by Fyodor Tyutchev (~930 verbs), Vladimir Benedidtov's collection of 1835 (~1000 verbs). The XIXth century texts contains about 40 % past tense forms: 41 %, 39.5 %, 41 %, 44.5 %, 41 %, respectively. The percentages of present tense are also similar: 34.5 %, 37 %, 39 %, 40.5 %, 36.5 %, respectively. We find about 1710 finite verbal forms in Iosif Brodsky's poems (A Part of Speech and the first part of To Urania), the percentage of past and present tenses is close to the parameters appearing in Lomonosov’s and Derzhavin’s texts: 23 % and 56 %, respectively.