Statics and Dynamics of Description in S.T. Coleridge’s Poem «The Rime of the Ancient Mariner»

Abstract

The research task is to study the nature of the correlation of the three main parts of speech in the text of the poem by S.T. Coleridge’s «The Rime of the Ancient Mariner», one of the first poetic works of English romanticism. Part-of-speech features are involved in the study, reflecting the nominality and nature of the description: nouns, verbs and adjectives. The study uses both directly observed frequencies and indexes reflecting them. The absolute frequency numbers of nouns, verbs, and adjectives recorded in each part have been normalized through dividing by the number of words in each part, which made it possible to obtain comparable data for parts of the poem that differ significantly in volume. A number of statistical procedures are used for the analysis: Busemann coefficients, and the coefficient of variation, chi-square test. Their application made it possible to determine the relationship between statics and dynamics in the text. A power function is used to reflect the frequency distribution of nouns, which proved to be very successful for this material. It allows us to determine the degree of nominalization of various parts in the poem. The results of the study indicate a fairly high stability of Coleridge’s style within the framework of the poem in terms of nominalization and dynamics of description. In addition, the article notes strong prevalence of the dynamic description over the static one.