Dosadašnja proučavanja srpskog pravnog jezika 19. veka

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the studies of the Serbian legal discourse of the 19th century con- ducted thus far. It can be stated that all the studies so far, excluding the research of Miloš Luković, have been unsystematic and there has been a lot of variation from author to author. The initial criteria for choosing the corpus have influenced the major differences in the authors’ approaches. The most widely employed approach incorporates a combination of traditional historical linguistics with sociolinguistics. Authors have studied texts from all the territories where Serbian was used as an official language, the time frame spanning from the First Serbian Uprising until the modern standardization at the end of the 19th century. All levels of language were

encompassed in the analyses, but most attention was devoted to the lexical and terminological levels. Lan- guage characteristics were chosen by the differential approach, which discourages systematic comparisons and

a synthesis of the results. Aside from linguists, lawyers have taken an interest in studying the nature of the legal discourse of the aforementioned time period. Additionally, the administrative language of the church has been a special subject of interest for linguists. Due to the heterogeneous nature of the corpora and the approaches themselves, in the future we need to approach these topics systematically from different angles, starting from traditional studies in the history of language, all the way to modern studies of discourse analysis.