Functional Styles

Functional Styles.

In a highly developed language like English or Russian the same idea may be differently expressed in different situations. On various occasions a speaker makes use of different combinations open to him in the vocabulary. Part of the words he uses will be independent of the sphere of communication. There are words equally fit to be used in a lecture, a poem, or when speaking to a child. These are said to be stylistically neutral. They cover the greater portion of every utterance. The rest may consist of stylistically coloured words.

Stylistically coloured, therefore, are words suitable only a certain definite occasions in specific spheres and suggestive of specific conditions of communication. Dictionaries label them as colloquial, familiar, poetical, popular and so on. The classification varies from dictionary to dictionary.

The term style is open to more than one interpretation. The word is both familiar and ambiguous. The Oxford Dictionary records it in twenty-seven different meanings. Primarily style is a quality of writing; it comes by metonymy from Latin stilus, the name of the writing-rod for scratching letters on wax-covered tablets. It has come to mean the collective characteristics of writing, diction or any artistic expression and the way of presenting things, depending upon the general outlook proper to a person, a school, a period or a genre. One can speak not only of Dickens’s or Byron’s style, but also of Constable’s and Christopher Wren’s, of classical, romantic, impressionistic style in literature, painting and music, of epic or lyrical style and even of style in clothes and hair-do.

Linguistically a functional style may be defined as a system of expressive means peculiar to a specific sphere of communication. The lexicological treatment of style in the present chapter will be based on the principle of lexical oppositions. Every stylistically coloured word presupposes the possibility of choice, which means that there must exist a neutral synonym to which it is contrasted, e.g. steed::horse. The basis of the opposition is created by the similarity of denotational meaning, the distinctive feature is the stylistic reference. A stylistic opposition forms part of an extensive correlation of oppositions because for a style to exist there must be a considerable set of words typical of this style.

The broadest binary division is into formal and informal (also called colloquial) English. The term formal English will be used in what follows to cover those varieties of the English vocabulary that occur in books and magazines, that we hear from a lecturer, a public speaker, a radio announcer or, possibly, in formal official talk. These types of communication are characteristically reduced to monologues addressed by one person to many, and often prepared in advance. Words are used with precision, the vocabulary is elaborate; it is also generalized-national, not limited socially or geographically.

Informal vocabulary is used in personal two-way everyday communication. A dialogue is assisted in its explicitness by the meaningful qualities of voice and gesture. The speaker has ample opportunity to know whether he is understood, the listener can always interrupt him and demand additional information, i.e. there is constant feedback.

The stylistically formal part of the vocabulary, chiefly but not exclusively used in written speech, is composed of special terminology , learned words common to all fields of knowledge, official vocabulary used in documentation and business or political transactions and, lastly, poetic diction including lofty words.

The informal part is traditionally subdivided into literary colloquial (cultivated speech), familiar colloquial, low colloquial (illiterate speech), folk speech (dialect) and slang.

И. В. Арнольд Лексикология современного английского языка Москва Высшая Школа 1973 p. 220-222