The metrics of poems written by Antonina A. Kymytval in Chukchi

This article explores the metrics of poems written by the poet Antonina A. Kymytval. The meter of the verse, written in Chukchi, has not been explored before. I collected a corpus of 40 texts and glossed them manually. After that, I analyzed the number of syllables in a line and the placement of word boundaries, stress, and syllables of different weight in the poems from the corpus. It turned out that the meter of Kymytval’s poems is syllabic; the position of word boundaries, both obligatory and optional, is regulated. The features of neither tonic nor quantitative metrics are detected. Due to the regular pattern of word boundaries, the length of words in Kymytval’s poems is different from the one in spontaneous Chukchi speech. These data show how the verse written in a polysynthetic language can be structured and how it differs from prose.