Stylistic Similarities and Differences of Russian Interwar Novels Through the Prism of the Most Frequent Words

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Abstract

The article deals with the analysis of the most frequent words in the corpus of Russian interwar prose. The starting point is a stylistic analysis using one of the most tested and reliable stylistic tools, Burrows's Delta, with the help of which we performed the clustering of the interwar period novels. Within the framework of this article, it is proposed to analyze the most frequent words in these novels and compare the results with the Delta data. Particular attention is paid to grammatical categories, the study of features directly expressed in frequency of word usage. The objective is to identify what the frequency of these features can say about the stylistic features of the analyzed texts; their similarities and differences. For this purpose, we introduced the concepts of high, neutral and low frequency of a word in a certain text. Based on the calculations, it is found that the styles of Shmelev and Pilnyak are sharply marked, for all 25 words the frequency level coincides in Leonov's "Road to the Ocean" and "Skutarevsky". The results also allow us to record the competition of prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns. None of the texts examined has a combination of equally high or equally low proportions of the prepositions "v" and "na". In addition, it is concluded that the high frequency of "kak" correlates with the metaphorical poetics of Olesha, five later novels by Nabokov, Fedin, Shmelev and Green, and that the abundance of the pronoun "ty" marks texts with a large role of dialogue and the informal, unofficial nature of this dialogue (Gaidar, Leonov, Platonov). The frequency of the pronoun "ona" is globally associated with the high role of the heroines in the narrative, but it turns out that the level of frequency for "The Shining World" is significantly higher than for "Running on the Waves".

About the authors

F. N. Dviniatin

Saint Petersburg State University

Author for correspondence.
Email: f.dvinyatin@spbu.ru
Saint Petersburg

B. V. Kovalev

Saint Petersburg State University

Email: bvkovalev@yandex.ru
Saint Petersburg

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