Classification of Functional Styles of the English Language (I.R.Galperin)

1. The Belles-Lettres Functional Style.

a) Poetry;

b) Emotive prose;

c) Drama;

2. 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;

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;

32 33 Дополнение

Informal functional styles:

1. Literary Colloquial;

2. Familiar Colloquial;

3. Low Colloquial.

Characteristic features:

1. Economy of expression;

2. Redundancy of language means;

3. Dialogical unity:

• Question – answer unity; “When do you begin? – Tomorrow.”

• Anadiplosis unity; “So you would naturally say … - And mean?”

• Repetition unity; “There’s so much talk of suicide,” he said. – James’ jaw dropped. - “Suicide! What should he do that for?”

• Parallelism unity; “Well, Mr. Desert, do you find reality in politics?” – “Do you find reality in anything?”

Lexical characteristic features:

1. Shortened words, contracted forms of auxiliaries, ellipsis;

2. Intensifiers (awfully, terribly, terrifically)

3. Emotionally colored words; Dear, sweet, old Charlie, duckie. Wasn’t she beautiful! Dear me! Well! Why! There!

4. Time – fillers (as a matter of fact, in fact, well!, to tell you the truth)

5. Words of the most general character (thing, lot …)

6. Occasional words, neologisms. “To think that I should have lived to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took’s son!” (A.T.)

7. Slang, jargon. “Oh, but wasn’t T.D. stewed! Say, he was simply ossified! What did Gladys say to him?”