Marina Tarlinskaya

Who is Marina Tarlinskaya?

Marina Tarlinskaja is a Russian-born American linguist specializing in the statistical analysis of verse. She uses the Russian linguistic-statistical method which, at the most basic level, counts the occurrences of word-stresses in ictic and non-ictic positions in lines of verse. From these, "stress profiles" can be built, by which bodies of verse of different periods, authors, genres, and even languages can be compared statistically. Writing in 1981, T.V.F. Brogan called her English Verse: Theory and History "the most extensive and most important study of English verse structure produced in this century." In 2005 she received the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award.

Tarlinskaja was born in Moscow and studied at the Foreign Language Institute, Moscow, receiving degrees of kandidat in 1967 and doktor filologicheskikh nauk in 1976, and teaching there from 1969 to 1981. She emigrated to the United States in 1981, smuggling out a draft of her subsequent work Shakespeare's Verse with the help of her husband, L.K. Coachman. She has been a Professor in the University of Washington's Linguistics Department since the 1980s.