Підручник для студентів старших курсів

PART THREE
SCIENTIFIC FUNCTIONAL STYLE
I. General Notes
1.1. The language used in texts belonging to different branches of knowledge, both sciences and humanities ¹⁾, is considered to be one of the major functional varieties of Modern English which is generally referred to as scientific functional style or scientific prose style.
Like any functional style of a literary language scientific prose style is characterised by the following extralinguistic styleforming factors:

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  a certain functional-communicative aim,
  
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  a form of cognition of objective reality underlying it,
  
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  a certain sphere of application.
  

The scientific functional style aims at transmitting (passing on) a certain amount of scientifically relevant information in an objective, logically consistent, precisely formulated, matter-of-fact way.
The form of perceiving and knowing the world and its internal laws underlying the language of science is the process of scientific cognition on the basis of analysis and generalization of different phenomena of reality.
The sphere of application of scientific functional style is scientific and academic communication, both, written (different kinds of scientific publications) and oral ones (presentations of scientific information in public at conferences, symposia, congresses, lectures at Universities, etc.).
The requirements of objectivity, precision and logical consistency result in quite a definite range of language means typical of this functional style which tend to be devoid of any implicit, indirect, allegorical modes of expression, and are characterized by striving for stereotype, clichéd, i.e. regularly reproduced forms of conveying information in order to avoid ambiguity and misunderstanding.
This predetermines general linguostylistic peculiarities of a scientific text on all levels of its lingual structure, namely, lexical, morphological, syntactical ones. Besides, certain paralinguistic features of a scientific text also result from the above mentioned factors.
The functional style of scientific prose is characterized by its own genre specificity which appears to be one of its most noticeable differential features. Among the most important genres of scientific style are a monograph, a journal article, a thesis and its synopsis, a review, a paper presentation (at a conference).