THE DEGREE OF DESCRIPTION NOMINALITY IN ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN TEXTS

Abstract

The article studies the degree of description nominality in fiction based on the usage of the two most frequent attributes: adjectival and nominal ones. The former are adnominals, expressed by adjectives or adjectival phrases (adjectives with dependent words), the latter are of-N constructions (in English texts) and genitive case of nouns (in Russian texts). The data-base includes extracts from highly popular English and Russian women authors: R. Galbraith, S. Kinsella, A. Marinina and T. Ustinova.The research is based on a quantitative analysis of data with the use of a number of statistical measures. The Busemann coefficient is used to study the relationship of adjectival and nominal attributes and the power function is necessary for fitting the distribution of distances of attributes counted within separate sentences.The analysis has demonstrated that the frequency of adjectival attributes as expected exceeds that of nominal attributes. However, the relationship of these types of attributes is highly different for the abovementioned authors. The results have proved that there is no difference in the proportion of these two attribute types between English and Russian texts whereas this feature distinguishes the styles of R.Galbraith and A. Marinina on the one hand, and S. Kinsella and T. Ustinova on the other hand.The research of the distance dynamics of the two given attributes from the beginning to the end of the works has shown big differences in the style of the authors, too. In a number of cases the tendency for compensation is observed while a drop in the frequency of one attribute type correlates with the rise in frequency of the other one.