5 Colloquial style

Colloquial Style – the peculiarities are mostly due to its oral character. They can be summed up: it is marked both by compression and by verbosity (многословие) and redundancy. Abbreviated words (clippings) – шеф (шофер), doc (doctor). The use of elliptical sentences, esp questions. (Gone for a walk? Having problems with it? Tired?). This economy also manifests itself in using broad semantic structure (stuff, business, thing). Redundancy reveals itself in double subject or in pause fillers (well, you see). This style is not homogeneous, has several levels. Within the CS you find standard colloquial with minimal degradation, casual C and maximum degradation corresponds to low colloquial.

Common C – chap, kid, dad, granny, go ahead, panicky, awfully sorry. Парень, девчата, ладно, оплошать, нахвататься.

In casual C we find slang, and in low C we find swearing\vulgarisms.

Medial degradation – slang is controversial issue, because traditionally by S we mean expressive phrases and words which break away from monotony of neutral language and introduce some novelty. Function of S – identity with a group (students’, military, drug addicts’). Yet other scholars such as Skrebnev or Crystall tend to believe that S refers to the vocabulary in general use , whereas group-restricted S had better be called jargon. S is very shorted. It soon dies out.

Jargon is a slang of a special group to mark social identity. Number of mechanisms: chicken-livered=cowardly (met), bread-basket=stomach (met, met), nuke – any nuclear weapon (abbrev), OD=an overdose of drug (acronym), paint-remover=inferior whisky (irony), graze=eat a meat (styl. restriction), paint the town red=celebrate wildly (met.+hyperbole), clear as mud – irony.

Sometimes expressions are based on double metaphor – компьютер завис – завис на два часа.

Cant (арго) – the jargon of the underworld – secrecy

Persuader – dagger (metonymy)

A barker – a pistol (metaphor, metonymy)

A lined wallet – a wallet full of money (met)

6 Poetic style

Poetic words form a rather insignificant layer of the special literary vocabulary. They are mostly archaic or very rarely used highly literary words which aim at producing an elevated effect. They have a marked tendency to detach themselves from the common literary word-stock and gradually assume the quality of terms denoting certain definite notions and calling forth poetic diction. Poetic words and expressions are called upon to sustain the special elevated atmosphere of poetry. This may be said to be the main function of poetic words. Poetical tradition has kept alive such archaic words and forms as quoth (to speak); eftsoons (eftsona,— again, soon after), which are used even by modern ballad-mongers. The use of poetic words does not as a rule create the atmosphere of poetry in the true sense; it is a substitute for real art. Poetic words are not freely built in contrast to neutral, colloquial and common literary words, or terms. The commonest means is by compounding, e. g. 'young-eyed', 'rosy-fingered'.

Archaisms: a)obsolete words; b) historical words; c)archaisms proper.

a) obsolete – are words which had fallen out of use completely as they have been replaced by syn-ms. Ex. dress (ModE) - habit (obsolete word), I think (ModE) – methinks (ob.w).

b) historical novelists make use of historical w. They are applied to concepts reflecting the past stages of the dev-nt of humankind. Ex. vassal –слуга. Such w-s are numerous in histirical novels as names of social relations, institutions & objects of material culture of the past. Ex. gonflat – перчатка. The limited usage of hist. words isn’t caused by linguistic factors but social ones. Stylistic function of h.w-s: to create a true to life background in the hist-al novels.

c) archaic words proper haven’t dropped out of usage completely as they are used in poetry & some official doc-ts. Ex. hither (here) / thither (there)

Types of historisms:

1. Phonetic, When a sound or a group of sounds is altered

2. Morphological, when a morpheme is changed

3. Semantic, when the meaning is changed, but word itself exist

4. Lexical, when the word perished a notion is substituted by another word

Stylistic, when the word changed its stylistic colouring.