The Donosheniya and Reports of Don Cossacks in the Mid 18th c.: Source Analysis

Introduction. The study is connected with the issues of electronic corpora of historical sources and diachronic linguistic corpora and is based on office documents of the 18th c. reserved in the Mikhailovsky Stanitsa Ataman archive fund (State Archive of Volgograd region). Methods and materials. The article considers donosheniya and reports as the main documents that were submitted from lower to higher authorities and had “donoshenie” (message, report) and “report” (report) designation. Solving source meta-markup problems the author examines the origin and meaning of words “donoshenie” and “report”, analyzes the content and functions of the documents, their text format and verbal formulas representing the components of the form. Analysis. The paper shows that the words have different origin, but common semantics reflecting the document function. Word “report” entered the Russian language in the early 18th century as a synonym for the original “donoshenie”. Initially, relevant documents were not distinguished, but gradually they were differentiated not only by name. Donosheniya can come from military men and civilians often contain a message and request. Reports are used mainly between host and stanitsa atamans, other military officials and are mostly informative documents. Reports are also often used as accompanying documents for other documents. The text format of donoshenie and report has similarities, but can be represented by different verbal formulas. As an accompany document report has a more concise and simple structure. Results. The author concludes that including donoshenie and report to the created source corpus as independent documents is necessary for faciliting their search and more exact representation of using language units. Standard speech markers can be applied for automatic recognition of texts as well.