Linguistic source study: periodization and aims for the future

The article discusses history and development of linguistic source study as a completely independent field of linguistics. In its periodization two stages are distinguished: accumulation of material and development of theoretical foundations of the new scientific field. At the first stage, in the XVIII-XIXth centuries, historians specializing in languages studied and published written monuments of predominantly Kievan Rus' period, so the character of the published materials was confined in various respects: genre ( most of the published monuments were public law acts, chronicles and works of Old Russian literature), graphics (records in uncial and semi-uncial writing were of the most interest to scholars), territory (only the monuments presenting northern and central dialects were regarded as those related to the Old Russian language history), chronology (the published monuments mainly belonged to the periods of the Old Russian and Great Russian languages). At the second stage, since the middle of the XXth century linguistic study of external appearance and content of written records for the purpose of their scientific publication has become the subject of an independent science - linguistic source study, whose theoretical foundations were developed within the Department of linguistic sources and written records study of the Institute of Russian language of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Although it was the study of Old Russian written monuments that laid the foundation for linguistic source study, today linguists don't deal exclusively with the past. The number of sources as well as the number of their types increases every day, so the main aim of linguistic source study should be development of new methods for the analysis of linguistic content richness and linguistic informativeness of written records as well as creation of a uniform classification adjusted for different characteristics of early and modern sources.