Elena V. Pronina

Candidate of Sciences (Philology), Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Russian Language and Literature

Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University

(Tula, Russia)

Dmitry D. Pronin

Student

Bauman Moscow State Technical University

(Moscow, Russia)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2024-4-172-182

Abstract. The article analyzes the artistic text of Leo Tolstoy's first work "Childhood" in a synchronic aspect using the methods of computational linguistics. The paper shows how digital technologies can be used to establish neologic formations, while observing a picture of the development of nineteenth-century literary language, the formation of norms, and the expansion of the range of grammatical and lexical tools of the language. Methodologically, the study is based on the “superimposition” of a set of unique words from the text of the story “Childhood” on the reference text closest to the time of its creation – the Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language by V. I. Dahl. The study provides a detailed justification for this possibility. A Python program is used to automatically create lists of unique words from the dictionary and the work. The paper describes the algorithm of the program including: text preprocessing, tokenization, lemmatization, and manual verification. The comparative results revealed 134 unique entities that are neologic phenomena. The authors have carried out their manual verification using the National Corpus of the Russian Language, differential vocabulary of the Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 19th Century, and the Sociolit digital platform. The article analyzes the lexical neoplasms of L. N. Tolstoy, interprets occasionalisms, words used by Tolstoy for the first time in the history of the Russian literary language of the new time, 2 hapaxes of “Childhood”, as well as a word with a new meaning developed in the language of that time and fixed. In this way the authors conduct a study of the writer's contribution to describing the picture of the vocabulary formation of the Russian literary language, reflecting the changes in the spiritual, social and material life of Russian society in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Keywords: computational linguistics, synchronic analysis, Leo Tolstoy, neology, lexicology, occasionalism, neologism, hapax.

Full text of the article (PDF)

For citation: Pronina, ЕV & Pronin, DD 2024, ‘The Study of Neological Trends in the Development of the Russian Literary Language of the Mid-nineteenth Century in the Works of Leo Tolstoy Using Methods of Computational Linguistics’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 4 (20), pp. 172–182, http://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2024-4-172-182 (in Russ.)

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