Summary
This paper deals with the language of the Act for the Kellion of St. Sava at Karies issued by archbishop Nikodim in 1321 and written in Serbian Church Slavonic. The analysis, conducted оn all linguistic levels, shows that the text consists of two parts. The first one is the arenga (lines 1‒119) and the second one consists of an exposition, a disposition section and a sanction (lines 120‒149). The arenga is written in the high functional style, marked by the frequent use of bookish syntactic means, such as participles and participle constructions, syntactic Graecisms, long sentences, compounds and bookish neologisms. It does not contain vernacular traits on the phonetic and morphological levels except for the Loc.sg vь kelii kareiskoi. On the other hand, the second part of the act exhibits characteristics of the lower functional style, with a low percentage of bookish syntactic and lexical traits and short sentences. In addition, it contains vernacular characteristics on phonetic and morphological levels. Thus the author made a clear difference between the two parts of the text. This act presents a valuable testimony to the existence of two functional styles in the same document, the use of which, in this case, is induced by the similar motives as in the case of diglossia in monastic charters.
