Lexis meets meter: attraction of lexical units in Russian verse

The presented work deals with the quantitative parameters of the statistically calculated attraction of words to a number of meters in Russian poetry. This attraction tendency can be detected by means of Fisher's exact test. At the level of large corpora, where the meters are not differentiated by the number of steps, we failed to detect any semantic causes of the attraction. As for the prosodic structure of tokens, it does not explain the majority of the cases for which the statistics suggest attraction between the words and meters. However, if we take the small subcorpora composed of lines of a particular meter differentiated by the number of steps, we are able to check whether the detected trends relate to the historical and literary reputation of a meter (for example, if this meter is often used for folkloristic styling, or for the theme of remembrance).