Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.47960/2712-1844.2026.12.333
Lexical Density and Diversity in the Poetry of Antun Branko Šimić
Irina Budimir
; University of Mostar, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Sandra Maletić
; Postgraduate Doctoral Study in Media and Communication (PhD student), University North
Ivan Markić
; University of Mostar, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Computing and Electrical Engineering
Abstract
The works of Antun Branko Šimić represent an inexhaustible source of numerous scholarly studies dealing, among other things, with language and style, the analysis of syntactic stylistic figures, lexis, phraseology, and similar topics. The corpus of Šimić's poetry was computationally processed more than a decade ago, resulting in parameters that demonstrate the lexical sophistication of his poetic language. Concordances, an alphabetical dictionary with frequencies, as well as frequency and reverse dictionaries, were compiled. In addition to these measures, the informativeness and content richness or poverty of a text can also be measured through lexical density and lexical diversity.
Computer-based quantitative methods (such as MATTR, MTLD, TTR, etc.) are used to calculate these parameters, depending on the length of the text. The richer a text is, the more demanding it becomes for reading. The quality of lexical analysis of written texts directly affects the accuracy of assessing these two measures. Owing to them, it is possible to calculate the reading difficulty of certain texts. They may reveal, for example, how demanding Šimić's poetry is for readers and why some poems are more difficult to understand than others.
Based on two measures of lexical richness—lexical density and lexical diversity—the aim of this paper is to determine the differences in the lexical structure of particular phases of Šimić's poetry, considering that the existing literature has proposed different classifications of poetic development, ranging from two to four phases.
The analysed corpus consists of poems from his Impressionist phase (1913–1917), as well as poems from the Expressionist collection Preobraženja (Transformations, 1920) and the cycle Pjesme o tijelu (Poems about the Body, 1920–1925).
Guided by Šimić's stylistic and poetic transformations across these phases, and applying measures of lexical richness (density and diversity), the obtained results indicate lexical and other differences that support the thesis of three possible phases in his poetic development. The results were compared with existing results of these two measures in the works of other Croatian poets. The research demonstrates that analysis of lexical density and diversity provides new insights into the lexical features of the observed groups of Šimić's poems, which differ from one another according to the degree of lexical complexity, while also clearly differing from the results obtained for the lexical richness of the other poets included in the comparison.
Keywords
A. B. Šimić; poetry; lexical diversity; lexical density.
Hrčak ID:
351191
URI
Publication date:
1.10.2026.
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