Parts of Speech Features in B. Pasternak’s Lyrics

The article studies the distribution of the main parts of speech in lyrics such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The analysis is carried out both in the poems taken separately and in whole collections. The main goal of the present research is to find out the level of stability and variability of the number relating to the parts of speech belonging to different classes in poetic texts. At the same time the article examines the questions concerning the degree of the poetic text nominality, the relationship between dynamic description of Pasternak’s poetic world, expressed by verbs, and static description made by adjectives. Six collections of Pasternak’s poems which constitute an important part of his heritage have been analyzed. Since the collections were published at different times and during different periods of the poet’s literary work, they reflect peculiar features of Pasternak’s creative manner and individual style over time. The counts have helped to make a data-base including 178 poems (5962 lines) in total that has been organized and used for the study. To achieve the goal a number of statistical methods are used, including the Busemann coefficient, chi-square, and the coefficient of variation. The results obtained demonstrated a high degree of the poet’s style stability at the level of morphological features, strong prevalence of dynamic over static description, significant downward deviation from the accepted norm of the number including adjectives and (in later poems) verbs.