The distribution of attributes in poems by Alexander Pushkin and Skinner’s hypothesis

Abstract

The article aims to test Skinner’s hypothesis regarding the distribution of linguistic units in the text. In accordance with this hypothesis, the distances between similar linguistic units should be less than between different units. In a more general form, one can raise the question of whether there is any regularity in the length of distances between identical units in the text. The units taken for this study are distinguished at a rather abstract level – different types of attributes. The scheme of attribute types is based on the part-of-speech characteristics of words that replace the syntactic position of the attribute. Attributes, constituting an extremely important component of the description of the artistic world, at the same time are an optional syntactic element in the sentence structure and are not determined by the valency of verbs in the predicative position. This allows the author to use attributes based on one’s preferences and the characteristics of the author’s style, which makes attributes an extremely successful means of describing an individual style. Distances between attribute types are determined by the number of steps from one attribute to another identical attribute in the chain formed by all attributes in the order in which they appear in the text. The article also considers the possibility of identifying patterns in the alternation of distances between attributes of the same type. The research material is six poems by Alexander Pushkin, written in iambic tetrameter. These poems are especially significant in connection with the place of the brilliant poet in the development of Russian literature and the Russian language. The poems are: “Ruslan and Lyudmila”, “The Prisoner of the Caucasus”, “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray”, “Count Nulin”, “Poltava” and “The Bronze Horseman”. The study was carried out by quantitative analysis of large volumes of text using a number of statistical measures (Busemann’s coefficient, chi-square, etc.). As a result of the analysis, data were obtained on the degree of attraction of the same type of attributes to each other, and the degree of structural ordering of the description was determined. The use of the exponential function was very successful in fitting the distribution of distances between identical attributes. It was found that within each poem there is not only a predominance of short distances over large distances for identical attributes, but also a certain trend in the distribution of these distances, which is well caught by the exponential function. As a result of the analysis, Skinner’s hypothesis was confirmed. This is expressed in the fact that in judging by the distances between attributes of the same type there is a hidden tendency towards order in preserving formal repetition until the fading of the stimulus.