Quantitative analysis of chastushka

The article explores the possibility of applying text clustering methods for the analysis of folklore material. Using the Stylo program, two chastushka corpora of 239 and 645 texts are analyzed. These texts were collected during a folklore expedition by the Centre for Typological and Semiotic Folklore Studies of the Russian State Humanities University in 2021–2023 in the Birsky District of the Republic of Bashkortostan. The article describes the principles of text clustering, based on the graph of the principal component analysis; and the most frequent words collocations analysis. It is shown that these collocations differ from collocations with the same words in everyday speech (compared to the main subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus). The use of Stylo reveals that the formed clusters reflect the most characteristic lexical and syntactic structure for a specific quantity of texts. For example, combinations of the negative particle «не» (not) with verbs in the couplet speech prevail over combinations with nominal forms, which are more typical for everyday speech. Combinations like «а + я + глагол» (and +I + verb) and «а + я + местоимение» (and + I + pronoun) prevail over the combination «а + я + служебные части речи» (and + I + function words), combinations with «на + существительное» (on + noun) or «на + прилагательное /местоимение + существительное» (on + adjective/pronoun + noun) prevail over the combination «на + местоимение» (on + pronoun), and the combination «в + существительное» (in + noun) prevails over the combination «в + местоимение» (in + pronoun). The identified trends demonstrate their stability and are observed in the analysis of both the corpus of 239 texts and the corpus of 645 texts. The article demonstrates the division of the corpus of 239 texts into texts with the pronoun «я» (I) and those with address forms. Three common variants of constructing address forms in couplets are highlighted: the introduction of an “”unreal addressee,” the description of a stereotypical situation, and the involvement of the listener.

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