Language portrait of an official of the 4-8th rank (a case study of Transbaikal written business manuscripts of the 18th century)

The article is devoted to the reconstruction of the linguistic portrait of a regional linguistic persona of the 18th century, namely an official of the 4-8th rank. The procedure of linguistic portraiture was based on material from the documents of Transbaikal business writing. Taking into account the specifics of historical linguopersonology, we considered two administrative documents - an order and a business letter, as well as a report - a response to the order in the linguo-pragmatic aspect. When analyzing the texts of historical documents, we used Yu. N. Karaulov’s technique to recreate the regional linguistic portrait of an official, the technique involves modeling a linguistic persona at three levels - pragmaticon, thesaurus and lexicon. As a result of the study, we reconstructed three regional linguistic persona of high-ranking officials as representatives of an elite speech culture completely devoid of the features of Transbaikalian regional dialect. It was revealed the presence of predominantly bookish vocabulary in the documents, as well as the active use of slavicism. The authors strictly adhere to the structure of a business letter, the documents have a clear motivation and a solved communicative task of a regulation and an order.