PUNCTUATION MARKS IN THE REGIONAL BUSINESS TEXT OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 18TH CENTURY: ON THE PROBLEM OF THE FORMATION OF THE RUSSIAN PUNCTUATION SYSTEM

Abstract

The article presents some results of the study of one of the stages of the formation of the Russian punctuation system. The research material is a corpus of handwritten documents of 1762 1796 from the State Archive of the Tyumen region. The research corpus includes business texts which were published by the author in the Tyumen University Publishing House, as well as documents introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The study used grammatical-diplomatic, comparative-historical methods and content analysis, using the method of quantitative calculations, presentation of materials and data obtained in the form of tables and diagrams. Trends in the use of punctuation marks depending on the genre of the document are revealed. It is found that punctuation is mostly associated with the design of the boundaries of the initial protocol, as well as with the change of the modality of the text (from narrative to imperative), presented as a prop “Text” in the structure of an abstract form. It has been established that the reason for the use of punctuation marks in the props “Text” may be the need to designate the boundaries of new information that is included in the document in connection with each new subject of speech. At the same time, the genre (type) is indicated and the content of the primary document is retold, from which new information is extracted. The pragmatic part in the form of the document reflects each new stage in the activities of the office, which is due to the need to resolve the current legal extralinguistic situation. The variants of punctuation design of subordinate explanatory sentences that contain the pronoun what are studied. Such grammatical constructions introduce the indirect speech of another addressee into the text, and therefore they are often included in the structure of written business communication. A formal grammatical analysis of complex syntactic constructions in two regional documents of 1773 and 1787 was carried out. The principle of selecting texts for research is the presence in the text of punctuation marks in large numbers or their complete absence. This feature of the text may be a consequence of different punctuation literacy of the writer. The text corpus has a significant volume. The volume of the corpus allows the author of the article to consider that the results obtained on the regional material are objective, and to project conclusions on the history of Russian punctuation as a whole.