WRITER’S LANGUAGE PERSONALITY IN ORIGINAL WORKS AND TRANSLATIONS FROM THE MARKEMOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW
Markeme analysis, a quantitative approach to studying literary texts, is a universal method. It has proved its efficiency when applied to the corpus of Russian poetic texts. The paper discusses the application of markeme analysis to studying language personality of writers that is represented in their texts. Markeme analysis is based on two key notions, the index of thematic markedness and the markeme. The Index is a numeral value representing a word’s frequency in a given text which indicates the importance of this word for the author. Markemes are words that possess positive Index and satisfy certain grammatical and lexical criteria. Every text, therefore, can be represented by the list of markemes found in it. The author’s aim is to compare and contrast lists of markemes allocated in writer’s original texts and his translations. The study employs the correlation coefficient, a numeral value that evaluates the similarity between two lists of markemes and, thus, between two texts. The paper also focuses on thematic groups of noun and adjective markemes. The paper represents an outline of translation history in Russia from XVIII century to early XX century. Original texts and translations by such writers as V.K. Trediakovsky, V.A. Zhukovsky, M.L. Mikhailov, A.A. Fet, K.D. Balmont, V. Ya. Brusov are taken into account. The results show that the correlation coefficient is connected with the effect that the author’s identity has upon his translations.