Punishment Formulas in the Decrees of Peter the Great (1714–1719)

The article is devoted to structural and semantic description of stable combinations (formulas) with the meaning of "punishment" in the personal decrees of Peter the Great, created during the period of his productive lawmaking activity. It is obvious that official language, functionally aimed to serve state communication as a whole, is the first to experience any social changes and ideological shifts of the time. Therefore, official phraseology, in a broad sense recording the "typical" and "standard," inevitably reflects the era it belongs to. In the context of crucial state restructuring that affected all spheres of Russian people's life, a strong influence of Peter's government initiatives on the language of official documents is observed. The repertoire of stable formulas nominating punishment in Peter's decrees includes a number of combinations inherited from the command language of the 17th century (for example, chinit' nakazaniye – to inflict punishment), but in most cases – with an increase in the semantics of its inevitability (budet uchineno zhestokoye nakazaniye – cruel punishment will be imposed). The decrees also contain formulas that record new phenomena that characterize the Peter the Great era: the imperial title of the Russian tsar, changes in the civil and military service, types of previously unknown "overseas" punishments (beating the spitz with a rut, sending to the galleys, taking a fine). Thus, a new phraseology for the official sphere of the Russian literary language of the 18th century was gradually formed.