Prohibitive constructions in Peter the Great’s prohibitive decrees of 1713–1715

The article presents a lexical and grammatical analysis of 40 syntactic structures with prohibitive semantics found in fi ve decrees issued by Peter the Great, aimed at combating corruption. The relevance of the research is determined by the need to study the category of prohibitive structures of the Russian language from the perspective of historical stylistics. The ways of expressing prohibitive semantics largely depend on the genre of the text and various extralinguistic factors, in our case, on the historical period, the personality of the reformist monarch, and his actions. The hypothesis posited that the subject matter of each document determined the choice and diversity of prohibitive syntactic constructions. The selected prohibitive constructions were categorized according to a fi eld structure, where the core, near periphery, and far periphery are marked. An attempt was made to reconstruct the causal relationship between the author’s intent and the linguistic units employed. The study concludes that during a period of radical change, prohibitive constructions were actively used in Peter the Great’s decrees to reinforce the monarch’ decisions, and their variability refl ected the pragmatic features of the documents. The fi ndings expand our understanding of the evolution of modality in the Russian language and hold practical signifi cance for the study of the history of business writing and Russian literary language as a whole.