Functional Styles

Functional Styles

According to Galperin: Functional Style is a system of interrelated language means serving a definite aim in communication. It is the coordination of the language means and stylistic devices which shapes the distinctive features of each style and not the language means or stylistic devices themselves. Each style, however, can be recognized by one or more leading features which are especially conspicuous. For instance the use of special terminology is a lexical characteristics of the style of scientific prose, and one by which it can easily be recognized. FS appear mainly in the literary standard of a language.

In the English literary standard the following major FS are distinguished:
1. the belles-lettres functional style,
2. the publicistic functional style,
3. the newspaper functional style,
4. the scientific prose style,
5. the official documents functional style.
Each FS is subdivided into a number of substyles.
1. The belles-lettres functional style has the following substyles:
a) poetry;
b) emotive prose;
c) drama;
2. The publicistic functional style:
a) oratory;
b) essays;
c) articles in newspapers and magazines;
3. The newspaper functional style:
a) brief news items;
b) advertisements and announcements;
c) headlines;
d) the editorial
4. The scientific prose style:
a) exact sciences;
b) humanitarian sciences;
c) popular- science prose;
5. The official documents functional style:
a) diplomatic documents;
b) business letters;
c) military documents;
d) legal documents.
The Belles-Lettres Style, its Substyles and its Peculiarities
The Belles-lettres style has its own specific function to inform the reader and to impress the reader aesthetically.
The means of this functional style are:
- genuine imaginative means and SDs;
- the use of words in its contextual meaning;
- the individual choice of vocabulary which reflects the author's personal evaluation;
- a peculiar individual selection of syntax;
- the introduction of elements of other styles;
Poetry is characterized by:

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  its orderly form which is based mainly on the rhythmic and phonetic arrangement of the utterances;
  
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  brevity of expressions,
  
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  fresh unexpected imagery;
  
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  emotional coloring promoted by synonyms,epithets,metaphors,similies,etc;
  
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  specific means of syntactical connection;
  
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  the synthesis of formal and informal English.
  

Emotive prose. Emotive prose is a combination of the literary variant of the language and the colloquial one, which is presented by the speech of the characters which is stylized that means it has been made "literature like" and some elements of conversational English were made use of. Emotive prose allows the use of elements of other styles but the author changes them and fulfils a certain function. SDs used: in emotive prose style are represented speech, detached constructions, gap - sentence link.
+Drama is the language of plays which mainly consists of dialogues. The author's speech is in the form of stage remarks. Any presentation of a play is an aesthetic procedure. The language of a play has the following peculiarities:
- it is stylized (retains the modus of literary English);
- it presents the variety of spoken language;
- it has redundancy of information caused by necessity to amplify the utterance;
- monologue is never interrupted;
- character's utterances are much longer than in ordinary conversation;
The Pubicistic Style, its Substyles, and their Peculiarities
The pubicistic style treats certain political, social, economic, cultural problems. The aim of this style is to form public opinion, to convince the reader or the listener.
Substyles: The oratory essays, journalistic articles, radio and TV commentary.
The main features:

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  a logically precise clear cut syntax;
  
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  a carefully and thoroughly thought out selection of words;
  
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  the use of sd and em;
  
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  carefull paragraphing;
  
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  intonation full of conviction and persistence;
  
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  consiseness (сжатость).