Description:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The aim of the study is to explore the diachrony of orality and literacy in the Old East Slavic birch-bark corpus. One of the most striking characteristics of the birch-bark documents is their high degree of orality. Due to their rootedness in the communication situation, they possess many linguistic and pragmatic features that are typical for spoken discourse. In addition, they show clear signs of literacy, i.e., properties that are common for the written word in general as well as features that typically occur in Church Slavic documents, the model corpus for literacy in Old Rus’. Considering the long period that is covered by birch bark literacy we may assume that the relation between orality and literacy features changed over time. To uncover these changes, the author analyzes the diachronic development of selected lexical, morphological, and syntactic features that characterize different registers and thus serve as markers of literacy or orality. The results support the thesis that Church Slavic bookishness, the initial model for literacy, was replaced by another model, namely non-bookish, official writing on parchment. Over time, the birch bark documents lost the features of literacy that were the immediate impact of Church Slavic writing, and adapted writing practices that were typical for non-bookish parchment documents.</jats:p>