THE USE OF CORRELATIVES OF CONDITIONAL CONJUNCTIONS IN DIFFERENT GENRES OF ORIGINAL OLD RUSSIAN WRITTEN TEXTS

The article deals with the peculiarities of the use and reasons for the choice of one of the existing Old Russian relative conjunctions in the apodosis of the conditional period. Generally speaking, the most prestigious genres (hagiography, homiletics) have a minimum number of conditional periods with correlatives, whereas works that are closer to the spoken language, on the contrary, tend to use correlative conjunctions in most of the conditional periods. Two main variants of correlatives to and a are distributed dependingon the degree of bookishness of the text. In homilies, as well as in Old Russian pilgrimages and works by Daniel the Prisoner the variant a is absolutely prohibited, while in other works the percent of conditional periods with the conjunction a in the apodosis is the higher, the closer the text is to the Old Russian language. The variety of correlative conjunctions is also more characteristic of less bookish texts: the maximum number of correlatives (a, da, i, ino, ti, to, to ti, to zhe) is typical of birch-bark letters, while in hagiography and homiletics only to and rarely i are possible. 
In the original Old Russian texts we can notice a tendency to choose one or another correlative conjunction depending on the conditional conjunction and on the context: so, for example, a tends to ache and, probably, to conditional conjunctions on -li; correlate da is never found in contexts with negation, correlate a is not present in contexts with a conjunctive. There exist no compatibility restrictions only for the correlate to in Old Russian monuments, which indicates the initial stage of the modern situation with the absolute monopoly of the correlate to.