Demonstratives in the charters of St. Gall

Abstract

The main scope of the present study is the semantic and syntactic analysis of the use of the Latin demonstratives based on quantitative and qualitative data from the volumes I, II, CXVIII of the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores (ChLA). These volumes contain original parchment charters between the 7th century and 801, written in St. Gall or in its vicinity. For the current analysis, 133 private legal documents were selected. The underlying principle of the examination is concerned with the ‘genre’ of the legal documents, namely the formulas, i.e. the strict set of words embedded in the tradition of charter composition that can only be changed when difficulties in understanding emerge and prevail. Therefore, anomalies presented 3–4 times in the corpus are evaluated, if they differ in the identity of the scribe, in the place and time of the composition, although, statistically, they could be excluded from the examination as outliers. Thus, the analysis focuses on the following anomalies: determiner multiplication, substitution, additional metalinguistic participles and articuloїde cases.