6. Types of narration
Narration gives an account of action or events. It can be considered as a motion picture that reflects: the world of the writer (outer and inner) and his attitude (romantic, realistic).
The writer can hide behind the figure of the narrator and all the events of the story are presented from the latter’s viewpoint. The writer only sporadically emerges in the narrative with his own considerations that may reinforce, or contradict those expressed by the narrator. This form of the author’s speech is called entrusted narrative. It can be carried out in the 1st person singular from his own name, as in Catcher in the Rye by J.D.Salinger. Entrusted narrative may also be anonymous. The manner of presentation suggests that the story is told not by the author himself.
A very important place is occupied by dialogue, where personages express their minds in the form of uttered speech. So dialogue is one of the most significant forms of the personage’s self-characterization.
Interior speech of the personage is best known in the form of interior monologue. It allows the author (and the readers) to peep into the inner world of the character, to observe his ideas and views. The workings of our brain are not intended for communication and are structured in their own unique way. That’s why they undergo some linguistic structuring to make them understandable to the readers. If the author wants to portray the disjoined, purely associative manner of thinking we speak about the so-called stream-of-consciousness technique popular with representatives of modernism.
Represented or reported speech serves to show either the mental reproduction of a once uttered remark or the character’s thinking. The first case is known as represented uttered speech, the second one as represented inner speech. The latter is close to the personage’s interior speech in essence, but differs from it in form: it is rendered in the third person singular and may have the author’s qualitative words while interior speech is materialized through the first-person pronouns and the language idiosyncrasies of the character.
7. Functional styles
To graphical peculiarities of scientific style belong headlines, titles, subtitles, footnotes, tables, schemes and formulae. The vocabulary is constituted by terms. Morphological feature is the use of personal pronoun we called the plural of modesty. Syntax does not differ from the style of official documents.
The graphical level of official style is distinguished by specific rules of making inscriptions, using capital letters and abbreviations. The morphological features are: the usage of Subjunctive, non-finite forms of the verb, impersonal and indefinite pronouns. The lexical level is characterized by domination of bookish, borrowed, archaic and obsolescent words, professional terms and clichés, such as: interest-free, status quo. The syntactic level is distinguished by long sentences often complicated by passive constructions.
Publicist style has language means of address: ladies and gentlemen, honourable guests, dear colleagues, dear friends etc.
The basic communicative function of newspaper style is to inform people about all kinds of events. Graphically the style is notable for the system of headlines (sensational – to grip reader’s attention, informative – to provide information, expressive – to evaluate the contents). The vocabulary consists mostly of neutral common literary words, though it contains political, social and economic terms, abbreviations, borrowings and international words, clichés. Syntax is a diversity of all structural types of sentences.
The function of belles-lettres style is cognitive-aesthetic.