Genre determination of grammatical expression of textual chronotope in regional documents of the 18th century

The article reveals several current issues of documental linguistics and genre theory – grammatical means of expressing/actualizing textual chronotope in the 18th cent. official documents from the Archive Fund  of the Mikhailovsky Stanichny ataman of the State Archive of the Volgograd Region, which are described with the procedure of genre related analysis. By comparing organization and grammatical representation of text chronotope in administrative, informative and registration documents, there was revealed a tendency for typological genre implications defined by the document properties and the character of its narrative structure. In most sources, the reference point relative to which the time of recorded actions and events is determined was established as being explicated: the date of the document is coordinated with the associated verb forms in a performative function. In the texts with a narrative element, verb forms correlate with this reference point or enter into temporal relations with each other, which might actualize in some syntactic constructions: complex sentences with a subordinate clause of time, condition, an explanatory object clause, etc. Although the set of forms varies in the documents, some corresponding regulations were noted in administrative documents as three time spans – preceding, simultaneous and subsequent actions (in military certificates), in informing ones – two time spans – preceding and simultaneous (in reports) or preceding and subsequent (in fairy tales). In non-narrative documents (receipts, statements), single actions or a number of single actions are recorded, they are loosely interconnected by temporary relationships or these relationships are not explicated. Such actions are viewed as belonging to the same time span, grammatical means of temporal characteristics of actions are monotonous. 

history of the Russian language, genre, preceding document, simultaneous document, subsequent actions document, documentary text, temporality, regional official writing