К истории развития способов выражения волеизъявления в языке церковных документов XVIII в. (глагольные формы)

Abstract

The paper discusses the grammatical means of expressing the imperativeness in the "Instructions for the Elders, or Deanery Overseers", written by Patriarch Adrian in 1697, and in the "Instruction for Dean Priests or Archpriests" in 1775, compiled by Metropolitan Platon Levshin. The second document was created on the basis of the first one, which provides methodological grounds for their comparative linguistic research. The language of the instruction of 1697 is in many respects close to the official language of the 17th century, in particular, to the language of «The Ulozhenie» of 1649. Therefore, common phenomena in the language of both instructions may indicate the influence of the official language of the 17th century to the document of 1775. The language of the instructions under consideration converges in some parameters: the use of the infinitive as the dominant means of expressing obligation and prohibition, the rare appearance in the document of Platon Levshin of modal-infinitive constructions and their absence in the document of Patriarch Adrian, the use of verbs in the subjunctive mood, which in this period are falling into disuse in a simple sentence. The revealed differences between the studied instructions show the dynamics of the grammatical means used to express private meanings within the subfield of the expression of imperativeness. So, in the text of 1775, the following phenomena were noted, which are absent or not characteristic of the text of 1697: the conjunction est’li in conditional clauses, modal-infinitive constructions with the verb nadlezhit, verbs in the subjunctive mood in subordinated clauses. At the same time, the grammatical means used in the instruction of 1775 appeared or became more active in the Petrine era. This may indicate the conservatism of the language of church documentation of the 18th century. But it is more likely that all of the listed linguistic means were formed within the so-called “Petrine pool”, which, according to V. M. Zhivov, “determines the range of linguistic diversity from which during the formation of a new type of Russian literary language in the 18th century there was made a choice which was resulted in the replacement of the plurality of registers by a single standard of the written language".