Features of legislative document in the text of Russkaya Pravda

The article characterizes document linguistics as a humanities branch aimed to establish the regularities of documents formation as well as properties, or attributes, of a document text. This determines an appeal to historical material as an object of the study. The author considers Russkaya Pravda to be a historical document. From the standpoint of document linguistics the author defines the main features of a legislative document, in particular, its functionality, structural properties, information content, space-time localization, compliance with certain linguistic parameters. The article contains analysis of these features manifestation in the text of Russkaya Pravda as the ancient monument of Kievan Rus law. The author characterizes the function of Russkaya Pravda, the structure of this document, the types of information, the language means of objective and social space reflection, the chronological parameters. It was found that Russkaya Pravda 's main function was a regulatory one; the structural properties are manifested in a peculiar form - Russkaya Pravda did not contain a blank now understood as a set of record details; the text of Russkaya Pravda conveys both factual and conceptual pragmatic information; the objective and social spaces are closely linked; temporal localization correlates the document's content with speech acts or with other events. The article raises issues about the authorship of the document, about its special “chronologically consequent” collectivity which is implicit in the text. The feature of compliance with certain linguistic parameters is seen as a way of transmitting information in the official-business style. The article notes that the text of Russkaya Pravda being incomplete is still characterized by cohesion, coherence and uniformity of syntax.