2. The Functional Reconceptualization of Genetically Heterogeneous Elements in the History of Russian Writing

7 In the pre-Petrine period the repertoire of registers of the written language had been realized primarily by the varying combination of genetically Church Slavonic and East Slavic elements. Accordingly, it was just these elements, relating to different spheres of social consciousness, that made up the linguistic material on which the symbolic dimension of language was constructed. The elements’ provenance did not in and of itself define their social and cultural connotations—it was not their provenance itself that was important, but their role in the linguistic consciousness of their carriers, that is, not their genetic but their functional parameters. As comparative historical analysis shows, particular elements took on the role of symbolic indicators of either traditional religious culture or of secular innovation not because of their origin (East Slavic, South Slavic or other), but because their carriers (who had no inkling of comparative historical issues!) perceived them as characteristic of particular linguistic registers, i.e., as bookish or non-bookish, normative or non-normative, and so on. In order to reveal how language participates in social and cultural processes, its prehistory must reveal not the etymological but the functional role of linguistic elements, their hermeneutic status in the linguistic consciousness of speakers and writers. Hence in examining that prehistory, we seek traces of how their functional relationships developed out of the diversity of linguistic elements of various origins, and how the functional particular acquired particular symbolic meanings.