1. Literary or Bookish Style:

a) publicist style;

b) scientific (technological) style;

c) official documents.

2. Free ("Colloquial") Style:

a) literary colloquial style;

b) familiar colloquial style.

As can be seen from this classification, both poetry and imaginative prose have not been included (as non-homogeneous objects) although the book is supplied with a chapter on versification.

Next comes the well-known work by I, V. Arnold "Stylistics of Modern English" (decoding stylistics) published in 1973 and revised in 1981. Some theses of this author have already been presented in this chapter (i. e. those that concern the notions of norm, neutrality and function in their stylistic aspect). Speaking of functional styles, Arnold starts With the a kind of abstract notion termed 'neutral style'. It has no distinctive features and its function is to provide a standard background for the other styles. The other 'real' styles can be broadly divided into two groups according to the scholar's approach: different varieties of colloquial styles and several types of literary bookish styles.

1. Colloquial Styles:

a) literary colloquial;

b) familiar colloquial;

c) common colloquial.

2. Literary Bookish Styles:

a) scientific;

b) official documents;

c) publicist (newspaper);

d) oratorical;

e) poetic.

This system presents an accurate description of the many social and extralinguistic factors that influence the choice of specific language for a definite communicative purpose. At the same time the inclusion of neutral style in this classification seems rather odd since unlike the others it's non-existent in individual use and should probably be associated only with the structure of the language.

One type of sublanguages suggested by Arnold in her classification - publicist or newspaper - fell under the criticism of Skrebnev who argues that the diversity of genres in newspapers is evident to any layman: along with the "leader" (or editorial) the newspaper page gives a column to political observers, some space is taken by sensational reports; newspapers are often full of lengthy essays on economics, law, morals, art, etc. Much space is also given to miscellaneous news items, local events; some papers publish sequences of stories or novels; and most papers sell their pages to advertising firms. This enumeration of newspaper genres could go on and on. Therefore, Skrebnev maintains, we can hardly speak of such functional style at all.

Of course Arnold is quite aware of the diversity of newspaper writings. However what she really means is the newspaper material specific of the newspaper only: political news, police reports, press reviews, editorials.

In a word, newspaper style should be spoken of only when the materials that serve to inform the reader are meant. Then we can speak of distinctive style - forming features including a special choice

of words, abundance of international words, newspaper cliches and nonce words, etc.

It should be noted however that many scholars consider the language of the press as a separate style and some researchers even single out newspaper headlines as a functional style.

One of the relatively recent books on stylistics is the handbook by A. N. Morokhovsky and his co-authors O. P. Vorobyova, N. I. Lik-nosherst and Z. V. Timoshenko "Stylistics of the English language" published in Kiev in 1984. In the final chapter of the book "Stylistic Differentiation of Modern English" a concise but exhaustive review of factors that should be taken into account in treating the problem of functional styles is presented. The book suggests the following style classes: