The Studies of Folklore Texts by Eastern Slavonic Scholars at the Time of Digitalization

The Studies of Folklore Texts by Eastern Slavonic Scholars at the Time of Digitalization The article deals with peculiarities of the studies of folklore texts by Eastern Slavonic linguofolklorists at the time of digitalization and Internet communication. The attention has been paid to the fact that the changes of the paradigm of the folklore studies and structural semantic transformations of folk poetic texts are taking place. They cause the revisions of the traditional points of views and scholars' approaches. These changes also define the development trends in folklore studies and linguofolkloristics – a separate research branch that was formed in the middle of the 20th century – that analyses a language of folklore together with a linguistic world image of a certain ethnic community. The views of scholars on the specification of the term "folklore" that is used to name a totality of modern works ("post-folklore", "Internet folklore", "internetlore" etc.) have been considered. The accomplishments of the Ukrainian linguofolklorists who study Ukrainian folk poetic texts (on the basis of the application of computer programs, internetresources, and compilation of lexicographic works etc.) have been considered. There have been described the achievements of the Russian linguofolkloristics in the field of processing and fixation of folk lore with the help of computer technologies. A special attention has been paid to the researches of Belorussian scholars who deal with the modern aspects of the folklore texts analysis. It has been found out that specificity of modern analysis of folklore texts is the application of new information technologies to the saving, ordering and processing of data. Folk poetic texts have been introduced into language corpora, created with the help of computer programs with automatic linguistic analyzers. Such approaches enable scholars to analyze language of folklore as a constituent part of national language in the combination with language units of different layers and an ethnic worldview. The described achievements of the Ukrainian, Russian and Belorussian folklore studies and linguofolkloristics show outstanding results and, at the same time, stress the need for more active applications of new technologies that became widely spread nowadays.