Symbol Frequency as a Component of the Statistical Profile of M.Yatskiv’s Short Stories Idiolect
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28925/2412-2491.2025.2512Keywords:
text corpus, text array, writer's idiolect, sequential samples, random samples, entropy, melodiousness of the textAbstract
This article presents a quantitative analysis of literary text at the graphological and phonetic levels. The study is based on the experimental research corpus of short stories by M. Yatskiv. A text array has been created for statistical research at the symbol (grapheme) level. The absolute (number) and relative frequency of each symbol of the extended Ukrainian alphabet has been calculated in the entire text array. Based on these frequencies, the rank of each symbol has been determined, and entropy has been calculated using the standard formula for the corpus as a whole, as well as for sequentially and randomly selected text segments of 108 characters each. For the entire text array and separately for sequentially and randomly selected segments, the distribution of characters by type and the euphony of the text have been calculated. Euphony has been defined as the proportion of vowels, sonorants, and voiced consonants in the text. The degree of correspondence between the frequencies of characters in the entire corpus and in the segments has been assessed using Pearson’s chi-squared test. The frequency distribution of characters in the research text array has been taken as the hypothetical theoretical distribution function, and the chi-squared statistics have been calculated for each segment. The null hypothesis stated that “the frequency distribution of characters in a given segment does not differ from the corresponding distribution in the full text.” Simultaneously, the rank of each character in the frequency distribution has been determined for every segment. All calculations have been made using programs in Python. The results have been compared with similar analysis of short stories by Vasyl Stefanyk. The findings demonstrate that even a randomly selected segment as small as one hundredth of the corpus can approximate the overall frequency distribution of characters with high probability. Moreover, the results indicate that for novellas as a genre with stable structural elements within a specific period of a national literature (e.g., Yatskiv and Stefanyk), linguistic statistics show minimal variation.
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