The language of Old Believers' council decisions. On the example of the concept “sobor”

Abstract

The paper includes the results of research into the language reflected in the texts of Old Believers' council decisions. For that purpose a large diachronic corpus of such texts of speech genre was used. The research focused on the concept “sobor”, one of the central concepts in the discourse on Old Believers and very frequent in their sources. The analysis consisted of a lexical-semantic description based on the interrelation between the language material and the socio-cultural context of the corresponding historical period. The methods of sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics and lexical semantics were combined in order to obtain a new approach to the texts of Old Believers' council decisions. The result of the research is a detailed overview of the specific way the concept “sobor” evolved in the Old Believers' sources. It outlines the dynamics within that confessional community and compares the development of the described concept to the processes in the standard Russian language.