Preposition as a component of business language in the second half of the 18th century (based on materials from the Regional State Archive of the Chelyabinsk region)

The article analyzes the main trends in the development of prepositions in shorthand business documents of the second half of the 18th century. A key trend is the continuous growth of prepositions, primarily through the utilization of internal linguistic resources such as conversion, or the transposition of adverbs; at that, the adverbs undergo no morphological change during this process. The growth of prepositions is observed to accelerate during periods of intensified public and state activity, correlating with the normalization and formalization of state administration. The active use of lexical and phraseological prepositions, characteristic of business language in the latter half of the 18th century, represents a distinctive feature of the business style of that period.