This chapter examines some uses of the dative absolute in Old Church Slavonic and in early recensional Slavonic texts that depart from notions of how Indo-European absolute constructions should behave, either because they have subjects coreferential with the (putative) main-clause subjects or because they function as if they were main clauses in their own right. Such "noncanonical" absolutes have generally been written off as mechanistic translations or as mistakes by scribes who did not understand the proper uses of the construction. In reality, the problem is not with literalistic translators or incompetent scribes but with the definition of the construction itself; it is quite possible to redefine the Early Slavic dative absolute in a way that accounts for the supposedly deviant cases. While the absolute is generally dependent semantically on an adjacent unit of discourse, it should not always be regarded as subordinated syntactically. There are good grounds for viewing some absolutes not as dependent clauses but as independent sentences whose collateral character is an issue not of syntax but of the pragmatics of discourse.

This article presents a pragmaphilological approach to the analysis of a recently discovered Novgorodian birchbark letter (N955) written in the course of matchmaking. This document has an unusual format and includes ornamentation generally associated with parchment manuscripts. My chief goal is to reconstruct the complex communicative situation and social functions that it reflects. To be properly understood, the text, format, and ornamentation should be treated holistically, as functionally interrelated elements. I show that the visually and textually discrete sections of the letter pertain to different addressees or to addressees with changing social roles in the communicative event. Finally, in an excursus, I offer an interpretation of two words that differs from the one in the published edition.

Some recent work in Historical Pragmatics has, in effect, rejected the Uniformitarian Hypothesis by arguing that deep cognitive archaisms persisted in the relatively recent attested stages of human language. Bax's “Out of Ritual” hypothesis argues that that pragmatic indirectness arose only in the later Middle Ages out of ritual language use: “linguistic indirectness developed through three successive stages”—from ritual performance to “autonomous forms of linguistic indirectness, that is indirect usages not restricted to the confines of ritual interaction” (Bax, 2002:96). In the present paper, I test this hypothesis by examining various languages attested in antiquity and the early Middle Ages, with a focus on legal speech acts. The language of the law is an apt test case for the “Out of Ritual” hypothesis, since legal institutions typically involve a mixture of ritualized and spontaneous communication. I also offer other arguments to prove that indirectness is far older than is claimed by the Out of Ritual hypothesis; that it need not have grown out of ritual at all; and that, even if it did, we cannot possibly know this from the linguistic evidence available to us from texts, reconstruction, or typology.

In comparison with Russian trial transcripts of the fifteenth century, trial transcripts of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show a drift toward compact, writer-based reporting styles. In an earlier study (Collins 2001), I suggested that this happened because of significant changes in legal institutions. From being primarily oral confrontations, trials became battles of documents filed in chanceries and scrutinized by bureaucrats oriented to the written word; concomitantly, the transcripts became dossiers of documents literally glued together and framed by short narrative passages, including reports of dialogue. In the present study I examine a representative sample of these trial dossiers to demonstrate the link between reporting and discourse-organization strategies and chancery practices. First, I discuss how the dossiers are arranged into episodes graphically and syntactically. Second, I investigate the methods of speech reporting utilized in the trial dossiers and the contextual motivation for the choice of one method over another.

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