Distribution of Parts of Speech in Short Stories by Russian Writers of the Early 20th Century

In this work, the distribution of parts of speech in the pre-revolutionary stories of Russian prose writers of the 20th century is studied. The aim of the study is to investigate the distribution of parts of speech on the material of a subsample of stories for 100 prose writers of the beginning of the 20th century. In the course of the work, texts of both well-known and little-known authors, written in different years — from 1900 to 1916, were investigated. The frequency of linguistic units was determined — for this, automatic lemmatization and POS-tagging were performed, and the correspondent frequency lists were built. All quantitative data obtained were edited, then analyzed in different categories: from the point of view of the author’s gender and his/her social origin. Quantitative data on the features of the use of certain parts of speech by each author are obtained and compared. The results of the study showed that the gender of the author is important in the use of one or another part of speech, and it was also shown that the greatest stylistic differences demonstrate a sign of the attribution of the text (the percentage of adjectives in text).