4. Types of context: situational, social and historical, linguistic. The notions of micro- and macro context.

In communication and composition, context refers to the words and sentences that surround any part of a discourse and that help to determine its meaning. Sometimes called linguistic context. In a broader sense, context may refer to any aspects of an occasion in which a speech-act takes place, including the social setting and the status of both the speaker and the person who's addressed.

Context means a variety of things. Context can be linguistic, involving the linguistic environment of a language item, as well as situational, involving extra linguistic elements that contribute to the construction of meaning.

(Linguistic context or verbal context refers to the linguistic environment in which a word is used within a text. As a matter of fact, understanding the meaning of  vocabulary items using linguistic context may involve syntactic and morphological interpretation of the elements within a text. In other words, to determine the meaning of an item, it is necessary to know whether the item is a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb, functioning as a subject, a predicate or a complement. This information gives important clues to the meaning of the text. But it is not sufficient to provide a full understanding of utterances.

The following example given by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 Syntactic Structures  demonstrate that a sentence that is grammatically correct, may be meaningless.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Although the above sentence is grammatically correct,  it is nonsensical , and thus demonstrates the distinction between grammar and meaning. It shows that relying on only the linguistic elements in a text to get meaning  is not enough. Meaning involves more than the grammatical description and goes beyond the scope of grammar to an understanding of the situational context that involves individual beliefs and knowledge of the world.)

Meaning can also be related to social variables involved in language use. Notions of politeness, shared beliefs, cultural features and social organization play an important role in the interpretation of meaning. For example the participants in the following conversations have different social status which is reflected in their utterances:

1. Excuse me Mr. Buckingham, but can I talk to you for a minute?

2. Hey Bucky, got a minute?

It is very probable that in the first example, a student is talking to a teacher or an employee is talking to his employer and in the second example two friends are talking to each other. The speakers are using markers that show social distance and power relationships.

7. What are the main sources of English and Ukrainian stylistics? Give examples.

THE vocabulary of the English language consists of three main layers, literary, neutral, and collegial. Literary layer maybe subdivided into common literary words, terms, poetic words, archaic words, barbarism and foreign words, neologisms. Within the collegial vocabulary we distinguish: common collegial words slang jargons, professional words, dialectical words, vulgar words. The neutral layer can be found both in the literary and collegial vocabulary and has no stylistic coloring common literary words have a neutral character to begin, to eat, child, food, money, and prison.

Terms – are words denoting nations of special fields of knowledge. Ex: linguistics phoneme, amplitude, anode, electron pain, and antibiotic. Archaic words are those which are not used now, expect special purposes thee, thy, hath (has) makert (make), whay (no). Barbarisms are words, which came into the English vocabulary from other languages and have retained their spelling in pronunciation. In many cases they have English synonyms chic (stylish), bon mot (a clever saying) adieu (good buy). Another group of barbarisms are foreign words, easy to recognize through spelling: en blena (well) voila (there you are) c`estca (that’s it) allez (come on). The stylistic function of barbarisms and foreign words is to create local coloring.

Neologism appear when there is the need to express new ideas and nations. They are produced in accordance with the existing word – building models of the English language.

Professions may not understand the jargons. Exam (examination), maths (mathematics), prof (profession), a big gun (an important person), a sewing machine (machine gun), an egg (an inexperienced aviator).

Professional words are the words used in certain spheres of human activity, mining industry: picks, (parts of mining device, tool) remote (a distant drift) sea: tin – fish (submarine) sparks (radior operator).

The function of the professionalism are different to characterize the speech of a person, to make, the description more realistic and precise. Dialectical words are such words that are connected with a certain area on region. Ex: a lass (a girl or beloved) a lad (a boy or young man) daft (unsound, silly) all of them belong to Scottish dialect and: volk (folk, zee (see) – Southern dialect. Irish: nurley – (hockey), colcen – (girl). Vulgar words – are words market by coarseness of speech or expression they or offensive, indecent.

The vocabulary of Uk. language is stylistically various. According to the sphere of usage we distinguish 2 groups of words: stylistically neutral vocabulary, stylistically marked vocabulary. The latter in its turn splits into bookish (scientific, official, newspaper-publicistic) and colloquial.

 Stylistically neutral: words which are not fixed to some style. It can be used everywhere: in books or magazine, at the conference or meeting, in works of art or in a private letter. Neutral words can name concrete objects, phenomena, abstract notions, features of objects, action. Neutral words constitute the basis of uk. language’s . They dominate in a text of any style. Bookish: words which are used mostly in written types of literary language. Most of them belong to foreign V. or have borrowed stems. Bookish V. can be subdivided into scientific, business-official, newspaper-publicistic. In lexical system of scientific , so-called general-scientific V used in any of scientific sphere: research, hypothesis, condition, interpretation.

Business-official V. prevails in official documents. The main groups of such V. are the names of official papers – statement, instruction, report, explanatory note, record of proceedings; nomenclature names (names of institutions, officials, ministry, Prosecutor-General).

 Newspaper-publicistic V: 1) social-political V – democracy, publicity, tolerance. 2) the words which have some solemnity, ponderability, inspiration, immortality, grandeur. 

Colloquial V. is the third stylistic layer of ukr. V. These are the words which have lower (in comparison with neutral V.) stylistic colouring and are used in oral types of language – natural conversation, everyday communication. For example: chatterbox - базіка, heavy hammer - балда, disorder - гармидер, aslant - набакир, hateful - осоружний, tufts of hair - патли, hiding – прочухан. Colloquial words give the language unofficial sounding, so they are inadmissible for business-official and scientific styles however they can be used in publicism and fiction.