Pasternak lyrics: part of speech structure

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the stability and variability of part of speech structures in the collections of lyrical poems by B. Pasternak, the Nobel Prize winner for literature. The analysis is based on the methodology proposed by Gabriel Altmann in his studies. The database includes 7 collections of Pasternak’s lyrics, published by him over the period of more than 40 years. The study was carried out on the material of both individual poems and the framework of entire collections. The results obtained showed that in Pasternak's lyrics, nominality of texts is very high. Within the framework of each separate collection a high stability of the general structure of parts of speech was observed. Dynamic description was found to prevail over static description. It was found that both types of description are guided by the tendency to compensation when the growth of one of them causes a decrease in the other. It was discovered that the distribution of parts of speech within each collection of lyrics is very well fitted by the Zipf-Alekseev function. Using the Euclidean distances between the collections of lyrical poems, published during different periods of the author’s creative work, assumptions were made about possible stages of the author's style evolution.