Rudnev D.V., Pushkareva N.V. Regulations of Peter the Great in the Aspect of Imperativeness
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2021.4.3
Dmitriy V. Rudnev
Doctor of Sciences (Philology), Professor, Department of Russian Language, Acting Dean, Faculty of Philology, Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia
Reki Moyki Emb., 48, 191186 Saint Petersburg, Russia
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3264-9483
Natalia V. Pushkareva
Doctor of Sciences (Philology), Associate Professor, Department of Russian Language, St. Petersburg State University
Universiteskaya Emb., 11, 199034 Saint Petersburg, Russia
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7918-5420
Abstract. In the era of Peter the Great, a new genre of regulations appeared in the Russian official language, with the help of which the authorities tried to introduce new, European principles of governing the country in Russia. The authors of the regulations were faced with the difficult task of finding speech means adequate to the new genre, corresponding both to the communicative tasks and to the addressee of the regulations. The performed analysis demonstrates a significant update of the means of the official language used in the Peter's regulations. In particular, the ways of expressing imperative have undergone a significant transformation. Along with the independent infinitive, which was inherited from pre-Petrine official speech, imperativeness begins to be expressed by various lexical means – both Russian and borrowed in origin (Polonisms, Germanisms, Latinisms): modifiers dolzhen 'must', imet' 'have to', nadlezhit 'should', prinuzhden 'be forced', etc. in combination with the infinitive, a particle da 'let' in combination with a verb in the present or future tense, etc. The models differed not only in origin and stylistic coloring, but also in their compatibility. Changes in the system of imperative means were due to various reasons – semantic (the need to more accurately express the imperative meaning), stylistic (the desire to make a business text more bookish, to tear it away from the colloquial basis), socio-cultural (the influence of European text patterns and socio-cultural models).
Key words: business language, history of business Russian, 18 th century, Petrine epoch, regulations, imperativeness, modal modifier, intensifier.
Citation. Rudnev D.V., Pushkareva N.V. Regulations of Peter the Great in the Aspect of Imperativeness. Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Seriya 2. Yazykoznanie [Science Journal of Volgograd State University. Linguistics], 2021, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 36-49. (in Russian). DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2021.4.3
Regulations of Peter the Great in the Aspect of Imperativeness by Rudnev D.V., Pushkareva N.V. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.