Bezus S.N., Varfolomeeva N.S., Smirnova M.A. Redundancy in style of official documents in medieval Spain

The study focuses on redundancy as a special feature of the official and formal style of the medieval Spanish language. The research objective is to identify signs of redundancy in Old Spanish formal writing at various levels: lexical, syntactic, and informational. The Spanish language demonstrates signs of stylistic differentiation early in its evolution. Primary features of the official and formal style are observed in medieval Spanish manuscripts, both in the external structure of a document (semblance of a template) and at the internal linguistic level (officialese, legal terms, clichés, performatives, pleonastic constructions). The presence of various pleonastic constructions allows us to speak of redundancy as a special stylistic feature. One of the informational redundancy manifestations is the double dating of a document (according to the Christian calendar and according to the Hispanic era or Caesar’s era). Lexical redundancy is verbalized in the synonymous combination (the chain of synonyms): predicative, attributive, objective, and adverbial synonymy. Syntactic redundancy manifests itself in the structure of a noun phrase (e.g. several determinatives), in structures with numeral reduplication, and in the pronominal subject. The results of this research can be used in studying the history of the Spanish language, as well as in revealing different aspects of functional stylistics.