NONRESTRICTIVE RELATIVE CLAUSES IN THE 19TH CENTURY SERBIAN LEGAL TEXTS (PRELIMINARY RESEARCH)

Abstract

In this paper we examine the status of nonrestrictive relative clauses within a limited corpus of administrative and legal texts from the 19th century. We determine the conditions that contribute to the nonrestrictive status of the sentences in the legislative subgenre of the administrative-legal style. We come to the conclusion that there is a significantly lower number of nonrestrictive relative clauses than of restrictive ones. Different factors specify the nonrestrictive feature of relative clauses in the observed corpus, including the uniqueness of the referent, a previously defined term in a document, a public function used non-referentially, anaphoric references of a whole syntagma or some of its parts, the sufficient determination of common nouns, and the use of abstract nouns. There are two types of nonrestrictive relative clauses: continuative and parenthetical. Nonrestrictive sentences of the continuative type are, in most cases, subject to legal and normative codes and acts, while the nonrestrictive sentences of the parenthetical type ordinarily encode ideologically important information.