Regulations of Peter the Great in the aspect of imperativeness

In the era of Peter the Great, a new genre of regulations appeared in the Russian official language, with the help of which the authorities tried to introduce new, European principles of governing the country in Russia. The authors of the regulations were faced with the difficult task of finding speech means adequate to the new genre, corresponding both to the communicative tasks and to the addressee of the regulations. The performed analysis demonstrates a significant update of the means of the official language used in the Peter’s regulations. In particular, the ways of expressing imperative have undergone a significant transformation. Along with the independent infinitive, which was inherited from pre-Petrine official speech, imperativeness begins to be expressed by various lexical means – both Russian and borrowed in origin (Polonisms, Germanisms, Latinisms): modifiers dolzhen ‘must’, imet’ ‘have to’, nadlezhit ‘should’, prinuzhden ‘be forced’, etc. in combination with the infinitive, a particle da ‘let’ in combination with a verb in the present or future tense, etc. The models differed not only in origin and stylistic coloring, but also in their compatibility. Changes in the system of imperative means were due to various reasons – semantic (the need to more accurately express the imperative meaning), stylistic (the desire to make a business text more bookish, to tear it away from the colloquial basis), socio-cultural (the influence of European text patterns and socio-cultural models).