Authorial compatibility of words in I.A. Goncharov’s novels: comparative stylometry

Abstract

The following article deals with peculiarities of unique lexical compatibility in classical prose of the XIX century and contains preliminary results of the cross-disciplinary corpus research performed by group of scientists of the Ural Federal University. This project suggests creation of individual syntagmatic profiles for the famous Russian writers. With works of I.A. Goncharov as an example and compared to the texts of other authors special context surrounding for words zhizn (life) and zhit (live) is systematized. Initial material is extracted through comparative statistical analysis of bigrams lexical pairs, when used in the same phrase context. Lexems zhizn (life) and zhit (live) are one of the most frequent words in Russian language, however, each author tends to use them in his own, special context surrounding. Novels by I.A. Goncharov (A Common Story, Oblomov, The Precipice, Frigate Pallada) provide relatively more issues of authors individual lexical compatibility for these words, than texts created by others; in addition a full list of syntagmatically active words for Goncharovs texts is represented in this article. Context analysis is conducted to show, how semantic connections between words in contexts reflect conceptual characteristics of Goncharovs idiostyle. Comments on the individual use of words zhizn (life) and zhit (live) by other writers A.P. Chekhov, L.N. Tolstoy, I.S. Turgenev and F.M. Dostoevsky are given. Conclusions are drawn about perspectives of performing comparative statistical analysis of lexical syntagmatics in modern philology

Keywords

• idiostyle
• i.a. goncharov
• lexical statistics
• stylometry
• lexical compatibility
• syntagmatics
• lexical bigram