The subjunctive infinitive and the subjunctive mood in the contexts with indirect speech in the business documents of the 16th–17th centuries

Indirect speech is widely represented in the Russian business documents of the 16th–17th centuries. The imperative forms could not be used in contexts with indirect speech and required a replacement. In the Old Russian language both the forms of the subjunctive mood and the subjunctive infinitive could be used as substitutes for the imperative. The research showed that the choice of the verb form in contexts with indirect speech depended on the person of the subject: the subjunctive mood was used with the subject in the 3rd person, while the subjunctive infinitive was usually combined with 1st person pronouns, and only sporadically with the subject in the 3rd person.
This tendency can be explained by the fact that the subjunctive mood and the subjunctive infinitive denote not only an event which hypothetically may take place in reality, but also express an evaluation of this situation in terms of its desirability and necessity. Consequently, both verb forms imply the existence of both the subject of the action and the subject of the evaluation of the situation. The subjunctive mood does not allow to coincide the subject of the action and the subject of the evaluation, which occurs in contexts with the 1st person pronoun. For this reason, the subjunctive mood in indirect speech is combined only with subjects of the 3rd person. The subjunctive infinitive usually appears in contexts implying the coincidence of the subjects of action and evaluation, therefore occurs in contexts with the subject in the 3rd person pronouns. However, there is no prohibition of its use when the subjects of action and evaluation refer to different participants of the situation, which explains its ability to be combined with the 3rd person.