Inferring stress placement variability from a poetic corpus

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse stress placement variation in the Poetic subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. We measure the extent of variation observed in the data and show that the rate of stress variation in poetry written in Modern Russian has been declining since the middle of the 19th century. We suggest that variation observed in poetry reflects variation in the language overall, although this link requires much further investigation. Nevertheless, we maintain that poetry is a useful resource in the investigation of stress placement, especially when other resources are not available.