Evolution of the Epistolary Formulas: from Birchbark Letters to Peasants' Letters of the XIX Century

Key words: epistolary tradition, speech formula, birchbark letters, gramotky of 17th - beginning of 18th century, peasants' letters of 19th century, formulary. In the following research the formulary of three corpuses of epistolary texts is studied: birchbark letters, gramotky of 17th - beginning of 18th century and peasants' letters of 19th century. Formulaic expressions from protocol, main body and eschatocol are investigated in detail in order to reveal usual formulaic expressions for this part of the text. Moreover, other types of the epistolary text: pismovniky, private merchants' and nobleman's letters, archive texts. On the example of the different texts it is possible to reveal basic tendency in the evolutionary processes of the common epistolary tradition. Diachronic study of the epistolary texts highlights the history of the speech formulas, lexical, pragmatical and grammatical development.