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Abstract: The study is aimed at identifying some quantitative parameters of the language and style of the poetic works of Feofan Prokopovich. The quantitative factor is one of the components of stylometrics. The length of a sentence and a word as the main units of text vary in certain genres of artistic speech, literary methods, in the process of evolution of the national language and the formation of norms, both general literary and poetic. The purpose of this study is to determine the quantitative parameters of the individual author’s style of Feofan Prokopovich, one of the reformers of the Russian language during the era of Peter the Great’s reforms and the early post-Petrine period, the leading author of syllabic Russian poetry, who left many of his own recommendations in his treatises on the art of eloquence and poetics regarding the types and sizes of the period, as well as the rules of versification based on the number and quality of syllables. The comparative analysis is based on the poetic works of Feofan – “A Word of Praise for the Glorious Victory over the Armies of Sweden”. The main research method is the quantitative analysis of the absolute and average length of words and sentences and the coefficient of the syntactic diversity in the poetic work of Feofan Prokopovich (with elements of the statistical method). According to the observations, the average length of a sentence in Feofan’s poetry is 15 words, which corresponds to similar indicators in the poetry of V. K. Trediakovsky and N. M. Karamzin – writers who sought to democratize bookish-literary syntax, moving away from heavy Latin-German models. Thus, Feofan’s searches correspond to the future main trend in the development of poetic and general literary Russian grammar, anticipating in practice the achievements of poets of subsequent generations. The absolute and average length of the sentence is determined by genre canons, compositional division of the text and the length of the syllabic line. Feofan’s verses prefer short-syllable words (from 1 to 3 syllables), and disyllabic word forms are the most active ones. This fact allows tracing the formation of the future leading role of disyllabic syllabic-tonic meters of Russian lyrics within syllabic poetry.

About the author(s) :

Natalia V. Patroeva

Petrozavodsk State University (Petrozavodsk, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3836-6393

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 20.06.2025; date of publication: 31.10.2025

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