Headings of the pleading documents in russian legislative acts and regional business writing of the 18th century

The article is aimed at studying changes in the title of pleading documents of the 18th cen. Due to a comparative analysis of language specificity of Russian legislative acts and regional business documentation of the 18th cen. some differences in the system of descriptive heading were noticed and referred to constant features of this genre of business writing. It is pointed that the texts under analysis might be divided into two groups - applications which call for a judicial decision and the ones that do not require it. In the focus of linguistic analysis the changes in the titles of the pleading text are. The analysis of central and regional documents revealed some asymmetry in the usage of descriptive headings. It is evident that until the end of the 18th cen. the title chelobitnaya was used to head a private pleading, which was inherited from the prikaz letter style, but could be specified with modifiers like iskovaja, mirovaja, javochnaja, apelljacionnaja. It is proved that due to the time span in the regional business writing a chelobitnaya heading demonstrates decrease in its usage and its specialization is presented in some newly coined equivalents. By the end of 80-s (18th cen.) the tendency of the heading alignment in the applications that require judicial decisions is noted which may be explained by the Imperator order to keep it out of the documentation norms.