Composition properties and lexical peculiarities of formal replies of the early 17th century

The article describes specificity of the text structural organization and lexical peculiarities of formal replies of the early seventeenth century, which belong to the Solikamsk archive. Special attention is given to means of text standardization. The formal reply is presented as a sample of the administrative writing genres that was intensively demanded in the 17-18th centuries and occupied an intermediate place in the system of document management, thus linking an upstream with a downstream administrator or local offices of the same level; additionally it is viewed to be a fact of the upstream private mail. Permanent and variable compositional features of the genre are identified. The stability of a three-part structure, basic etiquette formulas indicating to the addressee and the addresser, event-saturation of the central part of the document that opens by showing the source of the information are considered as permanent features; the usage of a petition formula, the shift of the semantic center to the final part to reveal an intention of an author are referred to as variable features. The functional analysis of verbal lexemes in the texts of the formal replies has allowed to prove that the most important source of replenishment of administrative language is the semantic derivation that contributes to the formation of set phrases, which, along with stencil designs and temporal and causal characteristics of the described events, are important means of standardization of the language of the document.