The thesis concerns peculiarities and special features of socio-legal terminology development and functioning in the Ukrainian documentation written in Latin in the 16-17th centuries. A comprehensive research of Latin socio-legal terminology of 16-17th centuries, recorded in the documentation of Ukrainian origin, is represented in this thesis. The specific features of the socio-legal terms functioning, use and creation in the specified period are outlined, considering their historical development, as well as the role and functions of Latin in various spheres of life of the population inhabiting Ukrainian territories in 16-17th centuries. This study characterizes the reasons and the ways of Latin functioning as the international language and the language of interethnic communication in a social and legal segment. Apart from that, it reveals unique features of the legal sphere on Ukrainian lands in 16-17th centuries.
The legal status of the medieval Ukrainian lands is an outstanding example of several legal systems symbiosis. On the one hand, the unique legal situation caused difficulties in the work of the courts and public authorities, and it allowed contradictory decisions based on different legal systems. On the other hand, it contributed to the creation of a diverse, but unified legal system, while Latin vocabulary and Roman terminological basis became a universal means of such a system to function (especially important was the written fixation).
Diplomatic traditions of workflow did not lead to complete identity in the presentation of content and design of the documents. Although, the general rules were followed more often in the large registries. In particular, due to the usage of forms – the regulated samples or manuals that served as models for clerks when compiling documents of different types and caused the unified usage of appropriate terminology to some extent. A variety of circumstances was causing changes and development of the forms over time. Therefore, they concerned the content rather than the formalities of the presentation. So, the dynamics and qualitative changes in the development and formation of socio-legal terminology should be monitored as well. Such a research should be based primarily on the study of the lexical design of clauses with the largest possible number of variable deviations. Thus, the layer of social terminology is more represented in the title clauses, the list of government members and jurors, including signatures. To a large extent, the terminologized lexical tools of clerks could not always satisfy the need to define specific realities or phenomena. Conditioned by poor mobility of information exchange, the precedent cases of nomination and use of new or infrequently used tokens, including multilingualism, created basis for supplementing the legal language with innovations and spreading terminological synonymy.
The study of individual semantic groups of socio-legal terminology in the 16-17th
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centuries often involves focusing only on a certain clause, or a few parts of the document. Thus, the richest material for the analysis of terminological names of secular and ecclesiastical positions of different levels is reflected in the clauses of title, narration, inscription and petition. For the allocation of legal terms with penitentiary significance, it is possible to limit oneself to the allocation of the sanction clause only. By contrast, to point out the largest number of terms that appear as a result of the interaction of classical Latin terminology and customary law terms, or those that appear due to interaction of Latin and local languages, or just innovations, the most informative are narrative clauses and, especially, optional subscription clause. As they mostly were based on the testimony of litigants, and therefore it is more likely to assume that while recording the responsible person had the least opportunities to replace terminological vocabulary with normative terms (sometimes also to fix the most accurate version).
