The article deals with two phenomena that affect the omission or addition of a syllable when creating a hexametric verse. The article uses epic poems of Nikolay Gnedich and Vasily Zhukovsky as examples of the Russian hexameter and the research material. The first phenomenon is the devoicing and vocalization of sonorants in words with a sonorant after stops such as vetr, vixr`, etc. The ability of sonorants to lose their sonority after stops or to develop an additional vowel sound for ease of pronunciation allows you to diversify the reading of any poetic text. At the same time, the same word can be read in different ways, depending on the conditions of meter and rhyme, or according to reading strategies. Since the hexametric verse of the 19th century did not have rhyme, the meter becomes the law determining the reading of the words in question: the counting of syllables and rhythmically unchangeable stops can regulate the choice of reading. The analysis of word usage allows us to conclude that the authors, having the possibility of dual reading of a word with one orthographic form, more often made a choice in favor of a spelling variant, and not a reading variant. To add a syllable, they used a variant with an inserted vowel, for monosyllabic or truncated reading, they chose the spelling of the word with a sonorous stun, thus creating a kind of guide to reading the verse. The second phenomenon is associated with the use of variable forms of adverbial participle with suffixes -v and -vshy/shy, with postfixes -s’ and -s’ya. Statistical analysis of the data showed that, in the presence of variability, the forms are distributed differently by the authors and practically were not dublicated: each author has his own set of adverbial participle forms. In addition to the syllabic principle of choosing a form associated with a poetic task, a connection was revealed between the forms of adverbial participles and specific lexemes, in some cases with clichés and collocations, which the author used to organize the foot and line. It was found that it is more convenient for authors to modify grammatical forms for the organization of verse than to use variants of words with sonorants. The analysis of works of Russian hexameter allows us to trace the history of orthographic and grammatical variants of words and forms and to identify those principles of their use in the text that influenced the development of Russian verse in the 19th century.
Vial'sova et al. (Mon,) studied this question.