Relativna rečenica sa inkorporiranim antecedentom u administrativno-pravnom stilu srpskoga jezika u 19. veku

Abstract

In this paper we have studied the status of sentences that incorporated antecedents within the administrative and legal registers of the 19th century Serbian language. The corpus consists of a Collection of Laws and Regulatory Decrees introduced in the 19th century. This sampling of relative sentences represents one of the oldest examples of relative sentences during their development period which can be dated back to medieval times. Even though these sentences can be viewed as peripheral, a substantial number of examples can be noted. Their peripheral status is due to the archaic legal lingo and its presence within the šumadijskovojvođanski dialect. We can observe several types of sentences with incorporated antecedent. The first type consists of sentences that are in preposition and that imply an “if - then” hypothesis. A special subtype of these sentences are relative sentences with an implied incorporated clause. The inverted sentence structure is a characteristic of army laws and regulations. The second type includes sentences with the incorporated antecedent in postposition. At the end of the 19th century these sentence structures fade away and remain as mere relics within phrases and proverbs.