Релативне реченице с релативизаторима у посесивној функцији у административно-правном стилу српскога језика у 19. веку

Abstract

This paper addresses the status of relative clauses with a relative pronoun in the possessive function in the administrative-legal register of 19th-century Serbian language. We examine relative clauses introduced by the relative pronouns koji and čiji. The corpus comprises legal texts enacted during the 19th century, including the Constitutions of 1835, 1838, 1869, and 1888, as well as the Constitution of 1901, together with the Compendiums of Laws, Decrees, and Regulatory Edicts from 1840 and 1845. We employed semantic, structural-syntactic, and historical-linguistic methods. A statistical analysis was conducted on a total of 57 examples. The analysis reveals a predominance of examples with the relative pronoun koji in the masculine singular genitive form, while examples featuring koji in the dative form are considerably fewer. The relative pronoun čiji is attested even before 1868 and is linked to usages in everyday language. After 1868, attestations of relative clauses with a relative pronoun in the possessive function are scarce, but it is observable that koji gradually yields to čiji, in line with broader linguistic trends. Nevertheless, given the limited number of extracted examples, the results of the statistical analysis and the derived conclusions should be validated on a more extensive corpus.