10. The colloquial style

The spoken "colloquial" layer is a peculiar subsystem of the English language. The function of the written imitation of spoken speech is to render the specificity of everyday conversation. Underlying many of its specific features are the following factors: (1) the spontaneous character of communication; (2), the private character of communication; (3) face-to-faceness.

Oral discourse has a great amount of ready-made formulae, cliches, all kinds of prefabricated patterns. Spontaneous conversation is facilitated by using stereotyped units. One can mention among them the so-called social phrases such as greetings (e.g. Hello, how are you?), thanks and responses (e.g. Thank for ...., not at all), -openings (e.g. Lovely day! Sorry to trouble you), - ongoing checks (Do you see? Are you with me?); - endings (Well, I must get back to work; Sorry, but I have to go now)

2. Creativity is also a result of spontaneous speech production. We make our conversation as we go along. We have no time to polish it deliberately, but one can do corrections, thus there are many hesitations, false starts, loose ends in grammar and syntax.

3. Compression tends to make speech more economical and laconic. It is reflected in the use of the following language phenomena:

• shortened forms and clipped words (e.g. nouns: fridge, lab, math; verbs: am -'m, is -'s, are - 're, have — 've, etc.). -

• words of broad semantics (e.g. thing, staff, one).

• ellipsis is usual in face-to-face communication as the situation (context) easily supplies the missing part (e.g. Same time, same place?).

• simplicity of syntax. Long sentences are seldom used in colloquial informal communication, for a simple reason that the speaker doesn't want to lose the thread of his own thought.

2. Redundancy reflects another aspect of unprepared speech production. Among the elements explicitly demonstrating this tendency are:

• time-fillers (e.g. You know, I say, let me see, sort of);

Vocabulary is a noticeable aspect of oral discourse. It may be subdivided into (1) literary, (2) familiar, and (3) low colloquial layers though the dictionaries do not reflect this division adequately.

11. The belles-lettres style (the substyle of poetry)

The belles-lettres style is a generic term for the following three substyles: (1) the language of poetry (verse), (2) emotive prose (fiction) and (3) drama.

Among the lexical peculiarities of verse (poetry) is also imagery (imagery as a use of language media which will create a sensory perception of an abstract notion by arousing certain associations (sometimes very remote) between the general and the particular, the abstract and the concrete, the conventional and the factual), which, being the generic feature of the belles-lettres style assumes in poetry, a very compressed form, with its rich associative power, frequent occurrence and surprising variety of means and devices of materialization (like metaphors of different types, metonymies, similes etc.) The emotional element is used in poetry to its full measure; this tendency finds its embodiment here in a great number of emotionally coloured words many of which have been regarded as poetic words.

The first substyle we shall consider is verse. Its first differentiating property is its orderly form, which is based mainly on the rhythmic and phonetic arrangement of the utterances.

Rhythm and rhyme are immediately distinguishable properties of the poetic substyle provided they are wrought into compositional patterns. They can be called the external differentiating features of the substyle, typical only of this one variety of the belles-lettres style. The various compositional forms of rhyme and rhythm are generally studied under the terms versification or prosody.

The most observable and widely recognized compositional patterns of rhythm making up classical verse are based on:

1. alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables,

2. equilinearity, that is, an equal number of syllables in the lines,

3. a natural pause at the end of the line, the line being a more or less complete semantic unit,

4. identity of stanza pattern,

5. established patterns of rhyming.

Less observable, although very apparent in modern versification, are all kinds of deviations from these rules, some of them going so far that classical poetry ceases to be strictly classical and becomes what is called free verse, which in extreme cases borders on prose.

The are 5 types of metre (ритм):

1. Iambic metre, in which the unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed one.

2. Trochaic metre, where the order is reversed, i.e. a stressed syllable is followed by one unstressed

3. D а с t у l i с m e t r e—one stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed

4. Amphibrach i с m e t r e—one stressed syllable is framed by two unstressed

5. Anapaesticmetre—two unstressed syllables are followed by one stressed

English verse is predominantly iambic. This is sometimes explained by the iambic tendency of the English language in general.