Verbs delat` / sdelat` in 18th-century texts of orders and decrees: A corpus study in the functional aspect

Abstract

The article analyzes the functions of the verbs delat` / sdelat` in 18th -century texts of decrees and orders contained in the Russian National Corpus. The research explores the specifics of these genres of organizational and administrative documentation. The article describes in detail the ways of using the tools of the Russian National Corpus to analyze the functions of the verbs delat` / sdelat` in selected official texts. During the study, we tested several methods of searching for language material (“Search for exact forms”, “Search for collocations” and “Lexico-grammatical search”), as a result, we found that the optimal way to perform our tasks is “Lexico-grammatical search”. Special attention is paid to the problem of using verbal-nominal combinations with the key components delat` / sdelat`. The article gives the definition of the term ‘stable verbal-nominal combinations’ and indicates some of the most characteristic features of such combinations. The analysis of the material, presented in the corpus, allowed us to conclude that in the 18th -century texts of orders and decrees, such combinations as vspomozhen'e (pomogi, pomoshh'), batareja, napadenie, predostorozhnost', ostanovka, rasporjazhenie, polozhenie, signal, uchrezhdenie were used. Many of the discovered combinations are not used in modern Russian, some have been replaced by synonymous ones. Over time, the status of stable ones acquired the combinations delat` / sdelat` rasporyazhenie, ostanovku, which are now actively used in formal styles of the Russian literary language.