Ways of Predicate Expressing in the Act Book of the Zhytomyr Hrodsky Government of 1611

Abstract

The article analyzes the ways of predicate expressing in the Act Book of the Zhytomyr Hrodsky government in 1611. The main source for the study of the specified main part of a sentence was the above-mentioned manuscript of the official business style of the beginning of the 17th century. It is the style of the act book that determined the functioning of the predicate mostly in the past tense forms, given the record of court cases about already committed crimes. The method of sampling the analyzed material and the technique of linguistic statistics gave reasons to state that the most used simple verb predicate (950 word forms) in the manuscript is expressed by a verb in the form of the past perfect tense, mostly masculine, since both the scribes and the complainants were mostly masculine gender, although at the same time predicates in the forms of the feminine gender, the plural, and sporadically the present and future tenses are also occasionally recorded. In addition, the functioning of simple verb predicates with the preservation of ancient verb forms of the past tense perfect and rarely the plusquamperfect were noted. The compound verb predicate (66 usages) in the studied official business texts traditionally consists of an auxiliary verb in all tenses and most often the word must and an infinitive with the suffix -ty. The frequency of functioning is also demonstrated by the compound nominal predicate, used 47 times in the manuscript, with the predominance of the verb-adjective as the main component of this main member of the sentence, mostly in combination with the linking verb to be in various tense forms. The fact that the manuscript belongs to the official-business style determined the frequency of the use of predicates expressed by the verb form in -no, -to (149 usages). The analyzed system of expressing the predicate in the Act Book of the Zhytomyr Hrodsky government in 1611 confirms the general tendency of the functioning of this main part of a sentence in the specified period of the Old Ukrainian language in manuscripts of the official-business style and demonstrates its persistence to the modern period.