Administrative terminology in the Transbaikal document discourse of the 17th century

The article considers the administrative terms князец ‘knyazets', лутчие люди ‘lutchie lyudi' as an instrument of the documentary discourse of the 17th century, which performs the function of power discourse. Discursive analysis of the terminological lexicon in the sphere of public administration involves, first of all, characterization of the specifics of the state structure of Muscovite Rus' of that period. In this case, the application of the provisions of M. Foucault's cratological theory seems to be methodologically right. Within the conceptual construct of the scientist, the power of the Russian Tsar of the 15-17th centuries is interpreted as dominance, and its embodiment during the period of intensive development of the territories of Eastern Siberia and the Far East is the episteme of colonization. The considered discursive practices, which are reflected in the corpus of texts of the Transbaikal business writing of the 17th century, testify to the peculiar perception of the complex social hierarchy of the Buryat society of that time by the conquerors of Siberia. The development of the territories inhabited by the indigenous peoples of the Circum-Baikal region should have inevitably been accompanied by inter-ethnic and inter-linguistic contacts, which would have resulted in the use of autochthonous borrowings in Russian documentary discourse denoting administrative positions in the Buryat society of the time. That didn't happen, and the absence of official terms даруга ‘daruga', зайсан ‘zaisan', засул ‘zasul', тайша ‘taisha', шуленга ‘shulenga' we can explain by the fact that all these terminological nominations replaced the Russian terms князец ‘knyazets', лутчие люди ‘lutchie lyudi'. In the context of the aforementioned episteme of colonization and the building of a rigid vertical of powerdominance, the differentiation of aliens by social status turned out to be unnecessary. The replacement of autochthonous borrowings by the Russian terms князец ‘knyazets' (with variants княжец ‘knyazhets', князек ‘knyazoyk'), лутчие люди ‘lutchie lyudi' was associated with the performance by these terms of the function of discoursemes that strengthened the imperial consciousness of former and new Russian subjects, as well as fixed the idea of vassalage of yasak people. We also have characterized the word “term” in connection with the ambiguous interpretation by historians of the language of its use in the diachronic aspect.