Nanosyntactic Description of Inverse Constructions in Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry: a Functional Hierarchical Approach

Abstract

Earlier studies usually considered inversion as a stylistic or pragmatic phenomenon, but its role in poetic discourse remained poorly studied at the level of deep syntactic structure. The article presents a comprehensive study of inverse constructions in contemporary Ukrainian poetry using functional hierarchical and nanosyntactic approaches. The aim of the research was to identify typical inversion models in poetry of the 2010’s–2020’s, assess their functional load, and study authorial variations in the syntactic representation of inversion. The research methodology combined corpus-oriented content analysis, topic modelling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), network analysis of syntactic relations, multidimensional stylometric modelling (Principal Component Analysis, multidimensional scaling), and machine learning classification algorithms (Support Vector Machines, Random Forest). Four authors (M. Yakovenko, M. Zelenenka, R. Krupka, B. Hnatiuk) were selected for the corpus of texts, where 412 inverse constructions were identified, with the domination of focus structures. Statistically significant correlations were found between the types of inversions and thematic clusters of poetic discourse (corporeality, traumatic experience). Individual stylistic patterns of inversion syntax were also established, which ensured high accuracy of attribution of texts by authorship. The results confirm that inversion in poetry is a systemic structural means of artistic semantization, and not a random deviation. Prospects for further research are related to the expansion of the corpus, cross-linguistic comparisons of prosodic and rhythmic parameters in stylometric modelling. This will bring humanitarian analytics closer to the level of deep computational interpretation of text, opening up new opportunities for studying poetic speech through the prism of big data.