Metodološki okvir za izradu korpusa pravnih tekstova 19. veka

Abstract

The focus of the paper lies in the methodological challenges tied to the process of the creation of a corpus of Serbian 19th century legal texts. While following the principles of balance and representativeness, we have emphasized four major criteria that are vital to the development of such a static specialized historical corpus: (a) type of language; (b) chronological criterion (10- year period); (c) functional and linguistic criterion (genre criterion); (d) legal production (as the most relevant non-linguistic criterion). Based on the linguistic criterion, the corpus is divided into two sub-corpora: legal texts of the pre-normative period and legal texts from the period of standardization of the modern Serbian language. As a sub-criterion for further categorization, we took into account time spans of 10 years, while the limiting factors were momentous cultural and political events in Serbian history of the 19th century. From a methodological point of view, we have come to the conclusion that one must bear in mind the following when creating a corpus of 19th century legal texts: (1) A small amount of text was printed in the pre-normative period, thus all the texts should be taken into account. (2) A more organized approach to legal codification (during the rule of Milan Obrenović) influenced the expansion of legal production, thus the texts from this period will be represented as samples, not as whole texts. (3) A large number of genres within the legal register are observed, including oral and written variations, thus genre annotation will be performed on selected texts. (4) The whole period will be studied, divided into 10-year time spans, so that it is possible to develop a chronological picture of the development of certain syntactic phenomena. Key words: