"Anyway, as the pre-Whitsun dog-days- barked themselves into silence, a good deal of pleasure could be obtained by a connoisseur who knew where to seek it. On Monday, for instance, from Mr. Selwyn Lloyd. His trick of seizing upon a phrase that has struck him (erroneously, as a rule) as a happy one, and doggedly

sticking to it thereafter is one typical of a speaker who lacks all confidence. On Monday it was 'not unpromising'; three times he declared that various aspects of the Summit preparations were 'not unpromising', and I was moved in the end to conclude that Mr. Lloyd is a not unpoor Foreign Secretary, and that if he should not unshortly leave that office the not unbetter it would be for all of us, not unhim included."

Litotes is used in different styles of speech, excluding those which may be called the matter-of-fact styles, like official style and scientific prose. In poetry it is sometimes used to suggest that language fails to adequately convey the poet's feelings and therefore he uses negations to express the inexpressible. Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 130 is to some extent illustrative in this respect. Here all the hackneyed phrases used by the poet to depict his beloved are negated with the purpose of showing the superiority of the earthly qualities of "My mistress." The first line of this sonnet 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun' is a clear-cut litotes although the object to which the eyes are compared is generally perceived as having only positive qualities.

PART VI FUNCTIONAL STYLES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

We have already mentioned the problem of what is known as / и n c-tional styles (FS) of language (see p. 32—35), but only to show that FSs should be distinguished from varieties of language. The main difference, be it remembered, is that the written and oral varieties of language are merely forms of communication which depend on the situation in which the communication is maintained, i.e. on the presence or absence of an interlocutor, whereas FSs are patterns of the written variety of language calculated to secure the desired purport of the communication. Each functional style of the literary'language makes use of language means the interrelation of which is peculiar to the given FS. It is the coordination of language media and SDs which shapes the distinctive features of each style, and not the separate language media or the SDs themselves. Each FS, however, can be recognized by one or more leading, especially conspicuousfeatures. For instance, the use of special terminology is a lexical characteristic of the FS of scientific prose, and one by which it can easily be recognized. The address "Dear sirs" will be a signal to refer the message to the FS of official documents.

However, since any FS presents a system in which various features are interwoven in a particular manner, one group of language means, a leading feature though it may be, will not suffice to determine the FS.

Now we are in a position to give a more exact definition of a functional style than