STYLOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF WORKS BYĞABDULLA TUQAYAND SÄĞİT SÜNÇÄLÄY: WHO IS THE AUTHOR OF THE POEM “SÖY ĞÖMERNE...”?

Abstract

This article is devoted to determining the authorship of the Tatar quatrain “Söy ğömerne...” using stylometric methods. Ğabdulla Tuqay, to whom this text had been traditionally attributed, and Säğit Sünçäläy, evidence of whose authorship was discovered by literary scholars at the turn of the century, are considered possible authors. The paper tests several distance-based stylometric methods. The material of the study was a corpus of digitized original poems by Ğabdulla Tuqay and Säğit Sünçäläy in the modern literary variety of the Tatar language. The final sample for analysis included 10 texts by Tuqay and 8 texts by Sünçäläy. The distance between texts was measured using Burrows’ Delta, Cosine Delta and cosine distance. Using the package Stylo, calculations were performed and dendrograms were constructed from them. The Cosine Delta measure with extraction of character n-grams (with n = 4) proved to be the most effective. This is explained, firstly, by the agglutinative structure of the Tatar language, since among the most frequent n-grams extracted, elements corresponding to inflectional affixes were found. Secondly, the use of character n-grams allows to increase the size of the analyzed data. In some cases, good attribution results have also been achieved using Cosine Delta based on wordforms and cosine distance based on character n-grams. Despite the impossibility to draw a definite conclusion due to the extremely small size of the texts analyzed, the comparison of the results of applying different methods shows that the most likely author of the quatrain in question is Säğit Sünçäläy.