Historical Stylistics

This article deals with the usage and combinability of words from the synonymic rows Rusʹ/Rossiia/Russiia, russkii/rossiiskii/rosskii, and russkie/rossiiane/rossy, on the basis of the Catalogue of the Kievan Metropolitans, from the early 18th c.—a little-known work on the history of the Russian Church. In the Catalogue, there are about the same number of place names using either rus- or ros- and the adjectives derived from them (a total of 32 and 37, respectively); however, there is an identifiable relationship between each adjective and a specific noun, apparently reflecting fairly stable collocations. Also, the author notes the predominance of ethnonyms with ros- and a general trend towards editing rus- to ros- in the later copies of the Catalogue and in its sole publication in 1776.

„O cursed bastard, o faithless traitor, o violent volves…” – apostrophes in Rozmyslanie przemyskie  as a different part of the Text…
This article treats about apostrophes in Rozmyslanie przemyskie. In the past few years in mediaeval studies began to appear the questions about what in this biggest oldPolish Apocrypha is original, written by it’s author, and what is taken from the Latin sources. Also began to appear the questions about the role of this text (treaty, story, mediatation) and who was it’s author. It was pointed out, inter alia, that some parts of the text is finished part of the sermon.
The author took a different, than previously indicated, area of the text. She selected for analyses the apostrophes. She analyzed only those apostrophes, which are addressed directly to the characters by the narrator – the independent ones, and not those, which are inserted into the mouth of the other performing character. Due to lack of Latin sources, we can assume that they were written by the Polish author.
Out of the characters, to which the narrator speaks in these complex apostrophes, Judas is distinguished by the number of apostrophes and their content. Invocations to the traitor add not much to the plot, the reader of the apocrypha can learn few about the Judas from them. They rather build the reader's attitude to this villain, cause they are very emotional. In addition, they refer to these defects of Judas, which can also concerne people of all ages – especially avarice and greed. Their language and content suggest that are the next - next to two sermons - ready, prepared rhetorically, passages of the text that can serve the work of preaching.

While Elizabeth’s linguistic excellence is widely acknowledged and easily verifiable in her writings, scholars have paid her prayers surprisingly little attention. Yet, the voice of Elisabetta supplex, of the Queen at prayer, is one of the most revealing examples of Elizabeth’s strategic gendering of her self-representation in writing as a political persona. In particular, this essay focuses on a small corpus of four prayers in vernacular attributed to Elizabeth’s authorship, which provide a crucial example of the linguistic and discursive strategies used by the Queen in her construction of a personal authorial voice directly addressing God. An idiolect of piety emerges in dialogue and confrontation with her political role, in what this essay proposes to call a form of “devotional Petrarchism”.

This article deals with external voicing in early news discourse, focusing on how the function of announcing future events was realised in letters to the editor and classified adverts, using data from the British daily newspaper The Times in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The external voicing of texts announcing future newsworthy events – upcoming cricket and football matches – is interpreted in terms of a participation framework in which the newspaper plays the role of the animator, mediating messages originating elsewhere. It is argued that this arrangement of the communicative situation is related to pre-modern journalistic practices that tended to rely on the aggregation of content rather than editorial processing of information.