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Burrows’s Delta Measure as a Tool Resolving the Hymnographic Discrepancy Issue Between Collections (based on German Catholic hymnals)
- Authors: Koryshev M.V.1
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Affiliations:
- St Petersburg State University
- Issue: No 9(903) (2025)
- Pages: 53-61
- Section: Linguistics
- URL: https://journal-vniispk.ru/2542-2197/article/view/342015
- ID: 342015
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Abstract
The paper aim is to identify and explain the differences between text collections of identical historical and cultural timespans that are contained in both editions of the Gotteslob – a prominent German-language Catholic prayer and hynmbook representing the vibrant hymnographic tradition of the last 50 years. The total data set includes 358 texts and 41,500 word tokens. Our stylometric analysis consistently relies on the Burrows’s Delta measure. The obtained findings demonstrate that German Catholic hymnography follows a nonlinear development pattern, characterized by the retrospectively ‘reinvented tradition’ of the hymnal genre; the latter largely explains the discrepancies between the studied text collections.
About the authors
Mikhail Vital’evich Koryshev
St Petersburg State University
Author for correspondence.
Email: m.koryshev@spbu.ru
PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Associate Professor at the Department for Comparative Studies of Languages and Cultures
Russian FederationReferences
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