Syntactic-statistical Analysis of the Prose Fiction Language (Experimental Study based on the Corpus of Russian Short Stories of the First Third of the 20th Century)

The present paper aims to detect and describe possible linguistic changes and stylistic patterns in syntax of Russian prose fiction language. The material of the study is the short stories of the Corpus of Russian short stories of the First Third of 20th Century that were written over the period 1901–1930. This period includes the sequence of crucial historical events that influenced not only various aspects of human’s life but also the language. However, the degree of such linguistic changes has not been identified yet. This paper proposes an approach to the identification of language changes and typical and specific stylistic patterns by the means of the application of the automatic syntax parsing that is based on the dependency grammar. That results in the creation of syntactically annotated corpus. Each of the annotated sentences is assigned a set of numerical indicators in accordance with the set of measures of syntactic complexity, which are based on the features of syntactic trees. Based on the data obtained, a statistical analysis is performed. The data obtained illustrate typical and specific stylistic patterns among authors, and allows to trace variations and changes in syntactic structures in a dynamic perspective.