The order of attributive collocations components in the old Russian texts from the period between the XI and the XIII centuries

This article analyzes the attributive collocations in ten Old Russian texts from the period between the XI and the XIII centuries, including precepts, epistles and The Tale of Igor's Campaign. The relevance of the study is due to the insufficient knowledge of many problems of historical syntax associated with the factors influencing the word order in the selected texts from the initial period of the formation of the Russian language grammatical structure. The purpose of this article is to find the principles of the arrangement of substantive-attributive collocations. With the help of continuous sampling method 2481 attributive constructions were extracted. For the analysis of the collocations we used structural-functional, descriptive-comparative and semantic-stylistic methods, and eventually came to the conclusion that in the Old Russian language attributes were usually placed before the main word both in two-word and multi-word collocations. The location of the attributive phrase components is influenced not only by the attribute’s part of speech, but also by the animacy of the defined word, the presence or the absence of a preposition, and the lexical meanings of the components of the attributive series.