Lecture 13-14 stylistic layers of english vocabulary

1. Functional styles

2. Stylistic aspects of formal English

3. Colloquialisms as a characteristic feature of informal vocabulary

4. Dialectal and territorial vocabulary variations

5. Different varients of English.

1. Functional styles

The term “stylistics” denotes a new discipline surveying the entire system of expressive resources available in a particular language. Linguistically a functional style may be defined as a system of peculiar expressions which belong to a specific sphere of communication. By the sphere of communication is meant the circumstances attending the process of speech in each particular case: a professional communication, a formal letter, a lecture, an informal talk, etc. All these circumstances or situations can be classified into two types: formal and informal.

The term “formal English” is used to cover those varieties of the English vocabulary that occur in books and magazines, what we hear from a lecturer, a public speaker or, possibly, in formal official talk. Informal vocabulary is used in personal everyday communication and may be determined socially or regionally (dialect).

Accordingly, functional styles are classified into two groups, with further subdivision depending on different situations.

2. Stylistic aspects of formal English

Formal style is restricted to formal situations. Literary-bookish words (the so-called learned words) belong to the formal style and fall into further subgroups:

1. officialese – words of the official, bureaucratic language (they should be avoided in speech and in print), e.g. assist (for help), endeavour (for try), proceed (for go), inquire (for ask), etc. An official letter from a Government Department may serve as a typical example of officialese. It goes: “You are authorized to acquire the work in question by purchase through the ordinary trade channel”. Such sentence can be translated into plain English as: “We advise you to buy the book in a shop”.

2. literary words – are mostly polysyllabic drawn from the Romance languages and, though fully adapted to the English phonetic system, some of them continue to sound foreign. They are associated with the lofty contexts in which they have been used for centuries. Their sounds create complex and solemn associations, e.g. solitude, fascination, felicity, illusionary, etc.

3. poetic diction – lofty words, as a rule more abstract in their denotative meaning, sometimes archaic, colouring and traditionally used only in poetry. The following examples are given in oppositions with their stylistically neutral synonyms, e.g. array::clothes, gore::blood, hapless::unhappy, ye::you, albeit::althoug.

4. archaic and obsolete words which are no longer in general use or out of use for at least a century, e.g. morn (for morning), eve (for evening), damsel (for girl), kin (for relatives), etc.

5. barbarisms – are words or expressions borrowed without any change in form and not accepted by native speakers as current in the language, e.g. entre nous (confidential), en regle (according to rules), bon mot (witticism), etc.

6. literary neologisms – are words and word-groups that denote new concepts, e.g. roam-a-phone (“a portable telephone”), graviphoton (“a hypothetical particle”), NIC (“newly-industrializing country”), etc. Among neologisms we can find the so-termed occasional words (or nonce-words) coined for a particular situation or context and aimed at a certain stylistic effect; some nonce-words coined by famous English authors have penetrated to the Standard English vocabulary and are registered in dictionaries, e.g. Lilliputian (J.Swift), snob (W.M.Thackeray), etc.

7. potential words – are words based on productive word-formation patterns and devoid of any stylistic colouring. Most of them compose numerals (e.g. thirty five, four hundred and sixteen), adjectives with the semi-suffix like (e.g. moth-like, soldier-like) and some other widely distributed patterns. Being easily coined and understood, potential words are not registered in dictionaries.

8. professional terminology includes special medical vocabulary, special terminology for psychology, botany, music, linguistics, teaching methods and many others. Term is a word or a word-group which is specially employed by a particular branch of science, conveying a concept peculiar to this particular activity, e.g. bilingual, palatalization, labialization (terms of theoretical phonetics).