Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки (Oct 2018)
The 1918 Constitution of the RSFSR: A Linguistic Portrait of the Text
Abstract
This article describes the referential aspect, grammatical, morphological, and lexical means of the text of the 1918 Constitution of the RSFSR as characteristics of the official functional style. The author aims to describe text elements kept by the official style throughout the 20th century and the ones that were its journalistic variations. The Constitution as a genre fixes a certain position achieved in the economy and politics and has a prescriptive character. A specific feature of the reference of the 1918 Constitution is its declarative nature and the attribution of a chain of situations to the future, which means it was not a statement but a proclamation of intentions. The complexity of the modal status of the text of the 1918 Constitution lies in the combination of modality of obligation and the possibility expressed by verbal predicates in the forms of the future tense, as well as constructions with the noun задача in the meaning of “plan”, “planned actions”. Additionally, the 1918 Constitution includes a foreign policy aspect. The tasks facing the Third All-Russian Congress of the Soviets concern the space that extends beyond the borders of Russia, since it is a question of victory of socialism in all countries. The 1918 Constitution does not consolidate the already achieved status of society and the state, describing the legal state of the country and society with the help of predicates in the present tense, but declares intentions and goals to be achieved by means of grammatical, modus, and lexical means. Compositionally, the sphere of the future extends to Chapters 1–5, which set forth the fundamental provisions of the law. The vocabulary of the 1918 Constitution is heterogeneous. In the text of the 1918 Constitution, there are three lexical layers: a) units belonging to the official style; b) units inherent mainly in journalistic texts; c) units having synonyms in the official style. In the lexicon of the text, there are terms and units with an official stylistic colouring. The new terms include such nominations as нетрудовые элементы “unemployed elements”, беднота “poor people”, социализация “socialisation”, etc. The article compares two versions of the 1918 Constitution, i.e. the first publication and the text on the ConsultantPlus website. The difference between the two texts lies in the fact that the first publication of the Constitution is characterised by: a) expression conveyed by means of word order; b) abbreviations; c) proper names; all of these are absent from the later version of the Constitution.
Keywords
