Attributive phrases in Barlaam's denunciation and Vasily Shuysky's oath-taking credentials

The article addresses the texts of Russia’s Time of Troubles (Smutnoye Vremya), namely Barlaam’s Denunciation and the oath-taking credentials of Vasily Shuysky. The research novelty and relevance is due to the fact that the language of these texts remains largely unstudied. The analyzed manuscripts are compared with the seventeenth-century regulatory documents and other parts of the historical document entitled A Different Chronicle. Quantification of examples and the word order analysis of the attributive phrases revealed a rather interesting mix of bookish and non-bookish characteristics: e. g., possessive pronouns are predominantly postpositive, and the texts contain adverbial participles (which in the XVII century was typical of bookish style), while demonstrative pronouns are only in preposition (which is a specific characteristic of official documents of this period). There is a possibility that in Vasily Shuysky’s credentials the attribute’s position depends on whether the main (defined) word is animate or not. This is the first-of-its kind Moscow document to demonstrate such dependency. The further research is expected to investigate the correlation between animacy/inanimacy of the defined words and position of attributes in other Moscow texts of the XVII century.