Old Russian Birchbark Letters: A Pragmatic Approach [Dissertation]

Description

Doctoral Thesis. This study is devoted to a corpus of Old Russian letters, written on pieces of birchbark. These unique texts from Novgorod and surroundings give us an exceptional impression of everyday life in medieval Russian society. The organic material has been preserved in the soil, and every year new birchbark letters tend to be unearthed during excavations in Novgorod. In this study, the birchbark letters are addressed from a pragmatic angle. A number of linguistic parameters are identified that shed light on the degree to which literacy had gained ground in the communicative processes of the time. It is demonstrated that the birchbark letters occupy an intermediate position between orality and literacy. On the one hand, old oral habits of communication persisted, and are reflected in the way in which the birchbark letters are phrased; they are characterized by a large degree of context-dependence. On the other hand, new literate modes of expression emerged, which can be seen in the development of normative conventions and fixed formulae. The subject will be of interest not only to scholars of Russian, but also to a broader circle of linguists who work in the fields of corpus linguistics and historical pragmatics. Preface 9 List of tables 15 List of figures 17 1. The field of study: Berestology 19 2. The background: Communicatively heterogeneous letters 33 3. Research question 49 4. Theory and methodology 55 5. Case study I: Imperative subjects 69 6. Case study II: Speech reporting 89 7. Case study III: Epistolary past tense 129 8. Case study IV: Assertive declarations 149 9. Concluding remarks 185 References 197 Index of birchbark letters 205 Summary 209 Samenvatting 213 Резюме 217 Acknowledgements 221