The principle of general contextualization in Serbian diachronic linguistics
As opposed to literary history, the development of modern Serbian diachronic linguistics has for many decades been unrelated to auxiliary historical disciplines like historiography and other historically oriented sciences, which has largely resulted from a growing gap between social sciences, humanities and philological sciences, as well as from a general decline in the volumes and character of collaboration among professionals in these two compatible research areas. Notably, however, this precarious situation is not limited to Serbia alone, with examples of similar developments in Slavic studies found in other countries as well. Both branches of language history, i. e. that addressing literary language and that addressing vernaculars, must turn more attention to auxiliary historical disciplines, to not only ensure higher accuracy of the results, but also to improve the general scope of academic practices. With the nature of the surviving medieval linguistic corpora in mind, studies in literary language history could especially benefit from a closer and more profound connection with the whole range of history-oriented sciences. This would help eliminate the main disadvantage of isolated linguistic research by placing the research object in a more general context, providing a close connection between research procedures and knowledge from other research areas. As a result, the researcher would be presented with a more complete picture and a greater potential for pertinent interpretation of facts. The paper proposes to apply the abductive method adopted from historiography which has strongly contributed to modern studies by enabling major intellectual shifts and growth of scholarly knowledge. It has been, as far as the Serbian environment is concerned, particularly significant in analyses of the early medieval history. The paper demonstrates the potential of this logical procedure on the study of a late 12th-century manuscript fragment that has helped determine the most probable place for the fragment in the history of Serbian spiritual and written culture.