Estimation of dispersion for the nautical thematic field in the old english poem “the seafarer/sǣfaran”

Doklady Bashkirskogo Universiteta. 2023. Volume 8. No. 2. pp. 24-33.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33184/dokbsu-2023.2.4

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The paper is about a statistical research to define the average squared frequency variation of the lexical units forming the textual nautical thematic field based on the Old English poem “The Sea- farer/Sǣfaran” of the tenth-century Exeter Book. The principal elements of the given field are syno- nymic sets such as “ship/scip”, “sea/sǣ” and “storm”. In the paper, a synonymic set is considered as an open system of lexical units with the identical meaning. The aim of the article is to determine an average quantity of word usage to a text length. It is the first attempt of applying the statistical approach to the study of dispersion for the nautical thematic field in Anglo-Saxon poetry. The poem consists of 124 lines and 706 lexical units. As far as the frequency of the nautical thematic field is concerned, the total number of word usage is 16 units.