Fiscal quantifications  in the structure of an official text from the 17th century Cover Image

Kwantyfikacja skarbowa w strukturze tekstu urzędowego z XVII wieku
Fiscal quantifications in the structure of an official text from the 17th century

Author(s): Józef Kość
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Political history, Historical Linguistics, 17th Century
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: text structure; official text; quantification; lustration; inwentory;

Summary/Abstract: Fiscal quantifications in the structure of an official text from the 17th century The strategy of the lustration procedure drawn from the parliament’s acts and fiscal instructions that shaped 17th century official discourse, consisted of an inventory comprising the royal assets in a specific structural formula based on a fiscal calculative pattern used for tax purposes. The inventory’s structure comprised the following text sequences: 1. Showing the source of revenue. 2. Showing the revenue. 3. Showing the costs of income. 4. Showing the income. 5. Determining the amount of tax liability from the earned income. A fiscal operation treated in a numerical way as a certain calculative concept became a constructional diagram, which textually materialised itself in lustration inventories of cities, villages and farms throughoutthe Lviv area, which were developed in a repetitive discursive practice. A quantitative assessment in lustration inventories used for tax purposes, except for structural exponents, also has some other textual exponents, which refer to assessable areas of land, the number of outbuildings, the amount of harvest, time of work, amount of money, tax liability or the number of people.They primarily included cardinal and ordinal numbers, expressed linguistically and numerically, indicating a particular number of units which were subject to quantification, lexemes which expressed approximate values, that is indefinite numerals, and also units of measurement. Official quantitative conceptualization, which was pragmatically conditioned, as it was in accordance with fiscaland parliamentary directives used with royal assets, expressed itself in the 17th century lustration texts using a serial and repetitive textualprocessin a structural and stylistic dimension.

  • Issue Year: 2014
  • Issue No: 48
  • Page Range: 33-47
  • Page Count: 15
  • Language: Polish