LECTURE 2. Functional Styles

LECTURE 2

Functional Styles

Functional styles are classified into bookish and colloquial. The group of bookish styles embraces the style of official documents, the style of scientific prose, the newspaper style, the publicistic style and the belletristic style. The group of colloquial styles includes the literary colloquial style, the informal colloquial style and substandard speech style.

The speaker resorts to a certain functional style due to such extralingual factors: the character of the situation in which communication takes place (official, ceremonial, informal, private or other); the relations between the communicants (formal, official, friendly, hostile, spontaneous); the aim of communication (transference of specific information, emotional attitudes, establishment of business contacts, etc. ); oral or written communication.

The style of official documents. This style aims at establishing, developing and controlling business relations between individuals and organizations. Being devoid of expressiveness, it is fully impersonal, rational and pragmatic. Its special language forms are rather peculiar. The graphical level of this style is distinguished by specific rules of making inscriptions, using capital letters and abbreviations. The lexical level is characterized by domination of bookish, borrowed, archaic and obsolescent words, professional terms and cliché s, such as " aviso" (авизо), " interest-free" (беспроцентный), " fidejussor" (поручитель), " flagrante delicto" (на месте преступления), " status quo" (существующее положение), " квартиросъемщик", " подрядчик", " повестка дня", " довожу до вашего сведения... ", " справка выдана дляпредъявления ... ", " прошу предоставить мне... ", " выписка верна". The morphological features of the style are such: the usage of obsolescent mood forms (Subjunctive I and the Suppositional), wide use of non-finite forms of the verb, impersonal, anticipatory and indefinite pronouns. The syntactic level is distinguished by long mid super-long sentences of all structural types, always two-member and I non-elliptical, complicated by complexes of secondary predication, detachments, parenthetic insertions and passive constructions.

The style of scientific prose. This style serves as an instrument for promoting scientific ideas and exchanging scientific information among people. It is as bookish and formal as the style of official documents, that is why both styles have much in common. To graphical peculiarities of the style of scientific prose belong number- or letter-indexed paragraphing, a developed system of headlines, titles and subtitles, footnotes, pictures, tables, schemes and formulae. A great part of the vocabulary is constituted by special terms of international origin. The sphere of computer technologies alone enlarges the word-stock of different language vocabularies by thousands of new terms, such as " modem", " monitor", " interface", " hard disk", " floppy disk" " scanner", " CD-rom drive", " driver", " fragmentation", " formatting" " software", " hardware", etc. Most of such terms are borrowed from English into other languages with preservation of their original form and sounding (модем, монитор, интерфейс, сканнер, драйвер, фрагментация, форматирование). The rest are translated by way of loan-translation (жесткий диск, гибкий диск) and in other ways (software -компьютерные программы, hardware – компоненты ЭВМ), Adopted foreign terms submit to the grammar rules of the Russian and Ukrainian languages while forming their derivatives and compounds (модемный, сканирование, переформатирование). The scientific vocabulary also abounds in set-phrases and cliché s which introduce specific flavour of bookishness and scientific character into the text (We proceed from assumption that... , One can observe that... , As a matter of fact, ... , As is generally accepted, ... , ).

One of the most noticeable morphological features of the scientific prose style is the use of the personal pronoun " we" in the meaning of " I". The scientific " we" is called " the plural of modesty". Syntax does not differ much from that of the style of official documents.

The newspaper style. The basic communicative function of this style is to inform people about all kinds of events and occurrences which may be of some interest to them. Newspaper materials may be classified into three groups: brief news reviews, informational articles and advertisements. Тhe vocabulary of the newspaper style consists mostly of neutral common literary words, though it also contains many political, social and economic terms (gross output, per capita production, gross revenue, apartheid, single European currency, political summit, commodity exchange, tactical nuclear missile, nuclear nonproliferation treaty). There are lots of abbreviations (GDP – gross domestic product, EU – European Union, WTO – World Trade Organization, UN – United Nations Organization, NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organization, HIV – human immunodeficiency virus, AIDS – acquired immune deficiency syndrome, IMF – International Fund, W. W. W. – World Wide Web). The newspaper vocabularies of the Russian and Ukrainian languages are overloaded with borrowings andinternational words (інтерв'ю, кореспонденція, інформація, ідеалізація, ідеологія, соціал-демократ, монополіст, that is why the abundance of foreign suffixes (-ция, -ация, -изация, -изм, etc. ) is a conspicuous morphological feature of the Russian Ukrainian newspaper style. One of unattractive features of the newspaper style is the overabundance of cliché s. A cliché is a hackneyed phrase or expression. The phrase may once have been fresh or striking, but it has become tired through overuse. Cliché s usually suggest mental laziness or the lack of original thought.