In the word order in the Russian literary language of the 18th century, according to many researchers, there had been no strictly fixed norm yet, however the grammarians of the period between the 18th and 19th centuries made attempts in their teachings to explain the order of this or that part of speech. A special role in consolidating the norms of word arrangement was played not only by grammars and treatises on the art of eloquence, which contained chapters on the order of words and parts of the period, but also by the works of writers of the Peter the Great era and the subsequent stage. The article describes the results of the analysis of the word order of 600 attributive phrases that are found in the panegyric text of Feofan Prokopovich The Word in Praise of the Blessed and Ever-Worthy Memory of Peter the Great, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russia... (1725). The article also describes the stylistic functioning of definitions involved in the creation of tropes and figures of speech. The predominant position in attributive constructions in the panegyric of Feofan Prokopovich as a whole is the preposition of the definition: the prepositive attribute is used in at least half of the cases in the structure of binomial phrases built according to the “agreed definition + definable” model. The predominant position in attributive constructions in the panegyric of Feofan Prokopovich is the preposition, but the prepositive attribute is used in at least half of the cases in two-word collocations. In the panegyric of F. Prokopovich attributes are widely used as homogeneous members, lexical and syntactic repetition is observed, which promotes amplification and alternation of prepositive and postpositive attribute; the panegyrics use distant attributive collocations, while a parallel arrangement of attributes emphasizes the opposition of the expressed attributes or objects. Attributive constructions in the 18th-century panegyrics are a stylistic means of increasing the expressiveness and creating a solemn pathos. A series of metaphorical epithets, repetition, parallelism, amplification, gradation, antithesis, other tropes and figures of speech are important research material that demonstrates the correlation between those presented in treatises on the theory of eloquence and the rhetorical practice of the era of the formation of new norms in the Russian literary language of the post-Petrine period.
Kazakovtseva et al. (Wed,) studied this question.