Uslovne rečenice uvedene veznikom ako u administrativno-pravnom stilu srpskoga jezika 19. veka

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to study the status of conditional subordinate clauses introduced by the conjunction ako in the administrative-legal register of the 19th century Serbian language. The corpus consists of Constitutions introduced during the 19th and early 20th centuries (1835, 1838, 1869, 1888, 1901), as well as of laws from the Collection of Laws, Regulations and Decrees from the Principality of Serbia. In the analysis we used a combination of semantic-syntactic methods and methods from historical linguistics and functional stylistics. We have found that conditional clauses with the conjunction ako occur mostly in law texts, which is a characteristic of both medieval and contemporary Serbian legal language. The subordinate clause with the conjunction ako represents the ideal surface representation of the deep form of the legal norm. This type of subordinate clause is primarily noted in preposition, and is rarely found in interposition and postposition. It was used with correlatives, especially in the first part of the 19th century (to, taj, takov, takova, takovo, zato, u slučaju). On the other hand, we have also found examples without the correlatives. Sometimes this type of clause can be transformed into a relative clause with the antecedent embedded into the structure of the relative clause. The tenses used in both the subordinate and the main clause vary according to the semantic parameter: regular – irregular (unexpected). In the subordinate clause the future tense, imperative, modal verbs and present tense were used, while past tense and the future form with the verb budem were rarely used