ON ONE MARKEMOLOGICAL STUDY, OR CAN FOUR CENTURIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE BE REDUCED TO TWO KEYWORDS

Abstract

We turn to Olga Artyomova’s research done in the school of markemology at Voronezh State University. The task of the research was to single out the keywords of the 17th-20th century English literature. Selecting 16 prose-writers of each half a century, the author undertakes a quantitative analysis of the resulting corpus of texts. The choice of materials, methodology, the terminology used, and 50 keywords (‘markemes’) for each author got through calculations are studied in the paper. Artyomova determines the so-called “straight-through” markemes common for each half a century and specifically - markemes common for all the four centuries. Both the scientific approach and the results obtained are evaluated. The authors’ own experiments are described carried out to specify the functioning of the word stock of Anglo-Saxon and Romance origin in random extracts from the works of three authors figuring in the research: O. Wilde, G. Orwell and I. Murdoch. Besides, the vocabulary of one novel by each of these authors was subjected to computer analysis to find out the correlation of Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) and Romance nouns.