Bezruč, from Těšín. Toponyms in Silesian Songs from the viewpoint of quantitative linguistics

Abstract

The study focuses on toponyms and their role in “Silesian Songs” by Petr Bezruč (1867–1958), an important Silesian poet and bard. The authors build on their previous quantitative­linguistic research on Bezruč, which focused on anthroponyms (“Géro versus Ondra. Anthroponyms in Silesian Songs as Seen through the Prism of Keywords and Collocations”), and thus present a comprehensive picture of proper names in this poetry collection. The aim of the study is to use quantitative methods — frequency and collocation analyses and keyword detection  — in order to clarify the functioning of place names in “Silesian Songs”, to classify their interrelationships, and to compare them with the system of Bezruč’s anthroponyms. Analyses show that proper names make up 30% of the keywords of “Silesian Songs”, they are thus an important feature of the poet’s poetics. Anthroponyms and toponyms are equally frequent. The distribution of geographical names corresponds to the Zipf distribution  — Bezruč prefers a narrow range of names, while many others are only used occasionally. Furthermore, most toponyms are oriented towards Silesia, but there are also localities associated with the Habsburg monarchy, Antiquity, and exoticism, which usually serve as building blocks of metaphors. In the context of Silesia, Bezruč places his poems primarily in the Těšín region; the Opava and Hlučín ones are in most cases the settings of his intimately­tuned poems. Other important traits of the collection are the tension between the names of inhabited and natural places and the multifaceted lyrical subject, which links, via collocations, the four most frequent geographical names of the text  — Těšín, Beskydy, Ostravice, and Dombrová.