Chapter The word ‘patent’ and its historical use in Polish

Overview & Synopsis

The article shows constitutive features of the structural pattern of the lexeme ‘patent’, understood as ‘statutes, legislative acts’ as used in the 18th and the 19th-century Polish. The following nominalizing/verbalizing features are defined as canonical for this structural pattern: 1) sender, 2) recipient, 3) justification for a legal act, 4) content of the regulation, 5) methods of making the law public, 6) spatio-temporal location, 7) locum sigillum and the sender’s signature. Among the secondary features, one can find the following: 1) meta-legal comments, 2) waivers, 3) recitals, 4) law legitimation, 5) indicating the vacatio legis period.