New participial forms in L. N. Tolstoy’s novel "Childhood" and the issues concerning the writer’s individual style (corpus study).

The article presents a comprehensive linguistic study of participial neologisms in L. N. Tolstoy’s novel "Childhood". The forms were identified using digital methods and compared with the materials from V. I. Dahl’s dictionary, the dictionary under Ya. K. Grot’s editorship, "Dictionary of the Russian Language of the 19th century" and texts from the Russian National Corpus. The relevance of this work is determined by the new possibilities offered by digital and corpus linguistics for studying literary texts and authors’ individual styles. Computer analysis identified seven participial forms which were new for that time: Russian podkleennyi (pasted up), zalakirovannyi (varnished over), prozhzhennyi (burnt through), vypuchennyi (bulging), vysokhnuvshii (dried), zasuchennyi (rolled up), ogolivshiisya (bare). These forms are considered as indicators of Tolstoy’s early individual style and testify to his grammatical and stylistic innovation whose presentation is the aim of this article. The analysis shows that the new formations are not random, occasional inclusions in the text. On the contrary, they perform important stylistic functions such as representational and descriptive (vitalising the objective world), characterological (conveying psychological states), and narrative (creating a "participial ligature" that pre-existed Tolstoy’s technique of internal monologue). The article gives special attention to the compo-sitional concentration of new participial forms in the climactic episodes, i. e., at the beginning of the novel and in the scene of the narrator’s farewell to maman. In these fragments, such forms enhance expressiveness and convey the protagonist’s deep distress. Even in his first work, as the findings indicate, L. N. Tolstoy deliberately expands the boundaries of the literary norm combining literary and colloquial vocabulary. Moreover, he also experiments with verbal derivation. The article highlights the dual nature of these innovations. They are simultaneously a manifestation of a consciously employed stylistic strategy and an organic stage in the formation of the author’s creative style. The article concludes that participles were a style-forming element of L. N. Tolstoy’s prose and determines their role in the development of the Russian literary language of the mid-19th century.

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