PRELIMINARY SKETCHES FOR A HISTORY OF THE FORM POZHALUI IN 17TH-CENTURY TEXTS

The article presents observations on the grammatical status of the lexeme pozhalui in 17th-century written records, as well as on its function as a politeness marker during this period. The first part of the article, devoted to describing the initial stage of the loss of verbal semantics of the form pozhalui, examines contexts from two types of texts characterized by the verbalization of requests: private letters and petitions. Private letters reflect the living, unpolished language of the period. In petitions, on the contrary, the statements are much more structured and formulaic, due to the official nature of the document. Therefore, observation of the functioning of the form pozhalui in these materials allows for a comparison of the degree of its desemanticization in different contexts. As a result, the article concludes that in the 17th century, pozhalui still functioned as a verb, although its actional meaning began to drift to the periphery of the word’s semantic structure. The second part of the article illustrates observations on the optional use of the form pozhalui in private correspondence between relatives, particularly within the vertical family hie rarchy — for example, in letters from a husband to a wife, from a father to children, etc.