LEXICAL FREQUENCY IN VUK'S LYRICAL FOLK POEMS

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated the lexical frequency of Vuk's lyrical folk poems (Serbian folk poems, first volume). The total number of lexemes is 5102, while the number of used (current) words is 72500. The diversity coefficient is 0,07, and the mean frequency or repetition index is 14,21. This ratio of the number of lexemes and current words indicates that the lexicon of lyrical folk poems is not very diverse, i.e., that there is a lot of repetition, which is expected because it is one of the poems’ important characteristic. The most frequent lexemes are: biti/jesam, on, ja, i ti, sebe/se, u, na, ne, da. The frequency, according to the part of speech, looks like this: nouns (2420), verbs (1652), adjectives (574), adverbs (212), pronouns (49), prepositions (64), numerals (40), exclamations (35), conjunctions (30) and particles (22). It is assumed that if the reader understands 75% of the words of a text, he will also understand the remaining 25%. In the observed corpus, 75% of the text covers 463 words (those with the highest frequency). Almost all of these words belong to the corpus of the modern Serbian language. In lyrical folk poems, which Vuk called feminine, the most numerous are nouns that denote persons of the female gender (girl, mother), so even according to the criterion of the most frequent nouns these poems could be called feminine.