Features English stylistics - Учебное пособие

It is no surprise, then, that many linguists follow their famous French colleague Charles Bally, claiming that Stylistics is primarily the study of synonymic language resources. Representatives of the not less well-known Prague school -V.Mathesius, T.Vachek, J.Havranek and others focused their attention on the priority of the situational appropriateness in the choice of language varieties for their adequate functioning. Thus, functional stylistics, which became and remains an international, very important trend in style study, deals with sets, paradigms of language units of all levels of language hierarchy serving to accommodate the needs of certain typified communicative situations. These paradigms are known as functional styles of the language. Proceeding from the famous definition of the style of a language offered by V.V.Vinogradov more than half a century ago, we shall follow the understanding of a functional style formulated by I. R. Galperin as a system of coordinated, interrelated and interconditioned language means intended to fulfil a specific function of communication and aiming at a definite effect. All scholars agree that a well developed language, such as English, is streamed into several functional styles. Their classifications, though, coincide only partially: most style theoreticians do not argue about the number of functional styles being five, but disagree about their nomenclature. This manual offers one of the rather widely accepted classifications which singles out the following functional styles: 1. official style, represented in all kinds of official documents and papers; 2. scientific style, found in articles, brochures, monographs and other scientific and academic publications; 3. publicist style, covering such genres as essay, feature article, most writings of new journalism, public speeches, etc.; 4. newspaper style, observed in the majority of information materials printed in newspapers; 5. belles-lettres style, embracing numerous and versatile genres of imaginative writing. It is only the first three that are invariably recognized in all stylistic treatises. As to the newspaper style, it is often regarded as part of the publicist domain and is not always treated individually. But the biggest controversy is flaming around the belles-lettres style. The unlimited possibilities of creative writing, which covers the whole of the universe and makes use of all language resources, led some scholars to the conviction that because of the liability of its contours, it can be hardly qualified as a functional style. Still others claim that, regardless of its versatility, the belles-lettres style, in each of its concrete representations, fulfils the aesthetic function, which fact singles this style out of others and gives grounds to recognize its systematic uniqueness, i.e. charges it with the status if an autonomous functional style. To compare different views on the number of functional styles and their classification see corresponding chapters in stylistic monographs, reference- and textbooks. Each of the enumerated styles is exercized in two forms - written and oral: an article and a lecture are examples of the two forms of the scientific style; news broadcast on the radio and TV or newspaper information materials - of the newspaper style; an essay and a public speech - of the publicist style, etc. The number of functional styles and the principles of their differentiation change with time and reflect the state of the functioning language at a given period. So, only recently, most style classifications had also included the so-called poetic style which dealt with verbal forms specific for poetry. But poetry, within the last decades, lost its isolated linguistic position; it makes use of all the vocabulary and grammar offered by the language at large and there is hardly sense in singling out a special poetic style for the contemporary linguistic situation, though its relevance for the language of the seventeenth, eighteenth and even the biggest part of the nineteenth centuries cannot be argued. Something similar can be said about the oratoric style, which in ancient Greece was instrumental in the creation of Rhetoric, where Aristotle, its author, elaborated the basics of style study, still relevant today. The oratoric skill, though, has lost its position in social and political life. Nowadays speeches are mostly written first, and so contain all the characteristic features of publicist writing, which made it unnecessary to specify oratoric style within the contemporary functional stratification of the language. All the above-mentioned styles are singled out within the literary type of the language. Their functioning is characterized by the intentional approach of the speaker towards the choice of language means suitable for a particular communicative situation and the official, formal, preplanned nature of the latter. The colloquial type of the language, on the contrary, is characterized b