FUNCTIONS OF THE RUSSIAN DEMONSTRATIVE PRONOUN S’ IN 14TH-15TH CENTURY OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS
The paper discusses functions of the demonstrative pronoun s’ ( сь ) in 14th-15th century documents on the territories controlled by the Grand Duchy of Moscow, Novgorod, and Pskov. The aim is to discover the functions - anaphoric, deictic or other - the pronoun could perform at the time in that type of texts. These are compared with the functions of s’ in the Common Slavic reconstructed by Antoine Meillet and the functions of s’ in 12th-13th century Old East Slavic manuscripts as described by T.V. Sumnikova. It is concluded that s’ is used as a means of deixis in most cases, with its old Indo-European meaning ‘close to the speaker in relation to time and space’. Some odd examples are explained as a kind of neutralisation of both anaphoric and deictic functions. Examples of s’ with positively anaphoric function are not found in the material considered.