Abstract
This article provides a quantitative corpus-based investigation of the Russian verb rhyme and its change in the Russian poetic tradition from the beginning of the 19th century to the 1960s. Versologists have studied the rhyme primarily as a phonetic entity, whereas morphology also contributes to the rhyme euphony due to the regularity of grammatical affixes. The research focuses on a micro-diachronic analysis of verb rhymes, summarises the identified historical trends, and defines acceptable and clearly avoided verb forms. The article also analyses the morphological patterns of verb rhymes including the most common lexical pairings and combinations of particular grammatical forms with different parts of speech. The study analyses data from the Corpus of Russian Poetry (a part of the Russian National Corpus) and introduces research methods and a corpus-based tool that were designed specifically for the statistical analysis and computational modelling of poetic features. The results show that authors experimented with word rhyme in various ways during different periods. Despite the idea of non-aesthetic verbal rhyme, which has existed since the time of A. Kantemir, its use in the historical perspective varies, there are periods of rise and fall. We distinguish two classes of rhyming pairs: combinations of two verb forms and morphologically dissimilar combinations of a verb form with a word of another part of speech. We conclude that restrictions on verbal rhyme apply mainly to combinations of past tense and infinitive forms. Nevertheless, the rhyming of indicative forms and morphologically heterogeneous rhymes is used more freely.
Аннотация
Статья представляет корпусное исследование русской глагольной рифмы и связанных с ней диахронических тенденций в русской поэтической традиции с 1800-х до 1960-х гг. До сих пор рифма исследовалась преимущественно с позиции фонетики, тогда как грамматические факторы учитывались недостаточно. Между тем морфология языка также влияет на эвфонию рифмы из-за регулярности аффиксов. Наше исследование проведено на материале Поэтического корпуса Национального корпуса русского языка. Для количественного анализа была создана база данных, содержащая дополненную разметку стиховедческих и лингвистических признаков, в том числе разметку рифмованных пар и цепочек, уточненные леммы и грамматические признаки. Результаты показывают, что авторы по-разному экспериментировали с глагольной рифмой в разные периоды. Несмотря на представление о неэстетичности глагольной рифмы, бытующее еще со времен А. Кантемира, ее употребительность в исторической перспективе носит волнообразный характер, выделяются периоды подъема и спада. Мы выделяем два класса рифмованных пар: сочетания двух глагольных форм и морфологически гетерогенные сочетания глагольной словоформы со словом другой части речи. Мы приходим к выводу, что внутри глагольной рифмы обнаруживаются ограничения в основном на сочетания форм прошедшего времени и инфинитива. Вместе с тем, рифмование индикативных форм и морфологически гетерогенные рифмы используются более свободно.
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Notes
Final Meeting: Selected Poetry of Anna Akhmatova. Translated by Andrey Kneller. Boston 2011.
At the moment, we have processed 60% of the verses, taking only data into account in which the rhyming schema does not change throughout the whole text.
In ipm (items per million words). Note that yet another natural way to perform normalization for the poetry data is to weight the occurrences of units per the number of verses (lines) rather than words or tokens. However, the rhymed chains can include three, four, even more than 10 rhyming lines, so weighting this data method per line would be difficult.
The absolute frequencies are weighted by the size of the corpus of a given author in a given time period.
Note that whereas A. Kantemir called the feminine infinitive rhymes like spati ‘to sleep’ as ‘vile’, by the 19th century the -ti(s’) forms were replaced by forms with the endings -t’(sja), -č’(sja), consistent with the masculine rhyme.
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The research was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2018–2019 (grant #18-05-0047) and by the Russian Academic Excellence Project «5-100».
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Lyashevskaya, O., Litvintseva, K., Vlasova, E. et al. Verb rhyme in Russian poetry: a quantitative analysis. Russ Linguist 44, 145–156 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-020-09227-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-020-09227-w