Names of documents in legislative acts and regional formal writing of the XVIII century

The article focuses on promising comparative research of the language of the eighteenth-century legislative acts and the results of the linguistic study of regional documents dating to that period. It is noted that the eighteenth-century legislation performed not only the administrative function, but also the codifying one. It means that legal acts regulated the process of document formation. The author performed the comparative linguistic analysis of central and regional documents and discovered for the first time four types of relations between the document genre names used in these texts. The first (basic) type is the one that determines how the appearance of a new document type in regional formal writing depends on the legislative approval of this document. The second type is related to the overlap of terms which describe functionally similar document genres. The third one reflects the asymmetric relations between the terms used in legislative and regional texts to describe the same document genre. The fourth type is formed by the relations between the names of document genres which replace each other. The identified types of relations between the document genre names in the legislative acts and regional instruments clarify the peculiarities of forming and functioning of term system in the eighteenth-century official language.