Quantitative grammar of poetical text: some preliminary results

It is necessary to determine the most fundamental parameters of neutral, standard grammatical embodiment of Russian poetical texts, panchronically as well as diachronically. It may help to define the starting point for grammatical and poetical analysis of different texts, complying with quantitative grammar convention or deviating from it to a certain degree. The paper discusses the procedure of distinguishing main morphological classes - enlarged parts of speech - and the hypothesis of these units stability in most of the extensive texts and corpora: about 42 % substantives, 21 % verbs, and 27 % adjectives and adverbs in syllabic measuring. The second discussed case is the dynamics of the quantitative ratio of finite verb forms, times and moods in Russian poetical tradition from the eighteenth-century poets (about 50 % of verbs are in the present tense, and 20-25 % are in the past tense) through Pushkin’s contemporaries (~37 % and ~39 %, respectively) to Brodsky’s poems (56 % and 23 %, respectively). The third discussed case is the portion of constructions with non-prepositional genitive case in the poetical texts between the XVIII and the XX centuries as a strong stylistic marker.