On the question of the indirect cases’ forms in the XVIII century business written records

The article examines the indirect case forms in the XVIII century business written records “Столп приходной денежной казны Пыскорской заводской канторы 1741 году” (“Столп” – Collection of Pyskor factory office documents on cash receipts in 1741). The focus is made on (i) the process of plural forms unification in D. (Dative), I. (Instrumental), L. (Locative) cases, the variability of the forms of D. and L. singular as a consequence 180 of ŭstems influence on the productive class of ǒstems, (ii) the number of eending and ѣending spelling variants in D. and L. During the study, comparative and quantitative methods were applied within V. M. Zhivov’s approach. The most significant finding in the course of the “aexpansion” was the nonstandard distribution L>D>I of the aending spread in different cases, as well as almost equal number of coexisting old and new forms. As expected, Genitive (G.) ending was used in nouns with an inappropriate concretely objective meaning of an abstract action or its result (mainly in monosyllabic deverbatives or their derivatives), of a realcollective meaning or a spatially local meaning. Additionally, the study found doublet forms with уand аendings in G. and a number of forms with the аending. New locative forms with yending for masculine nouns are poorly reflected, the form with e/ѣending remains dominant, and the endings ѣ and e in D. and L. are almost equally common despite letter “ѣ” being used much less frequently in the stems, which indicates the consolidation of the letter “ѣ” for a certain grammatical indicator.