Means of expressing imperativeness in the statutes of the era of Catherine II

Abstract

In the language of documents of the reign of Catherine II, the genre of statute, which was rare after the death of Peter I, became noticeably more active. There were created numerous statutes that dealt with various aspects of Russian life (maritime and military affairs, administration, legal proceedings, education, etc.) and were an important tool for the modernization and Europeanization of Russian state. The texts of statutes are of interest for studying not only how the authorities saw the desired structure of a certain sphere of public life, but also how relations between the participants (subjects of law) in these spheres should be built. In this regard, of particular interest is the imperative vocabulary of the statutes, which linguistically embodies the methods of legal regulation. The article describes and analyzes the means of expressing imperativeness in the two most important statutes of the era of Catherine II — in the “Constitution for the Administration of governorates of the Russian empire” (1775) and the “Discipline (Police) Regulations” (1782). The revealed imperative models are classified according to the ways of expression and of conceptualizing the imperative meaning and are compared with the models in the statutes of the previous era. Based on the comparison, the productivity of imperative models is revealed, and in the absence of models in the past, the sources of their appearance in the Russian language.