17. The style of official documents

There is one more style of language within the field of standard lit­erary English which has become singled out, and that is the s ty le of official d о с и т е п t s, or "officialese", as it is sometimes called. As has already been pointed out, this FS is not homogeneous and is represented by the following substyles or variants:

1) the language of business documents,

2) the language of legal documents,

3) that of diplomacy,

4) that of military documents.

Like other styles of language, this style has a definite communicative aim and, accordingly, has its own system of interrelated language and

stylistic means. The main aim of this type of.communication is to state the conditions binding two parties in an undertaking. These parties may be: the state and the citizen, or citizen and citizen; a society and its members (statute or ordinance); two or more enterprises or bodies (busi­ness correspondence or contracts); two or more governments (pacts, trea­ties); a person in authority and a subordinate (orders, regulations, ins­tructions, authoritative directives); a board or presidium and an assemb­ly or general meeting (procedures acts, minutes), etc. The most striking, though not the most essential feature, is a special system of cliches, terms and set ex­pressions by which each substyle can easily be recognized, for example: / beg to inform you, I beg to move, I second the motion, provisional agenda, the above-mentioned, hereinafter named, on behalf of, private advisory, Dear Sir, We remain, your obedient servants. In fact, each of the subdivisions of this style has its own peculiar terms, phrases and expressions which differ from the corresponding terms, phrases and expressions of other variants of this style. Thus in finance we find terms like extra revenue, taxable capacities, liability to profit tax. Terms and phrases like high contracting parties, to ratify an agreement, memorandum, pact, Charge d'affaires, protectorate, extra-territorial status, plenipotentiary will immediately brand the utterance as diplomatic. In legal language, examples are: to deal with a case; summary procedure; a body of judges; as laid down in. Likewise, other varieties of official language have their special nomenclature, which is conspicuous in the text and therefore easily discern­ible as belonging to the official language style. Besides the special nomenclature characteristic of each, variety of he style, there is a feature common to all these Varieties—the use of abbreviations, conventional symbols and contractions.

18. Compositional patterns of syntactical arrangement (Inversion, Detachment)

W о r d-o r d e r is a crucial syntactical problem in many languages. In English it has peculiarities which have been caused by the concrete and specific way the language has developed. This predominance of S—P—О word-order makes conspicuous any change in the structure of the sentence and inevitably calls forth a mod­ification in the intonation design. However, in modern English and American poetry, as has been shown elsewhere, there appears a definite tendency to experiment with the word-order to the extent which may even render the message unintelligi­ble, In this case there may be an almost unlimited number of rearrange­ments of the members of the sentence. Inverted word-order, or inversion, is one of the forms of what are known as emphatic constructions. Emphatic constructions have so far been regarded as non-typical structures and therefore are considered as violations of the regular word-.order in the sentence. But in practice these structures are as common as the fixed or traditional word-order structures.

The essential quality of detached construction lies in the fact that the isolated parts represent a kind of independent whole thrust into The sentence or placed in a position which will'make the phrase (or word) seem independent. But a detached phrase cannot rise to the rank of a primary member of the sentence—it always remains secondary from the semantic point of view, although structurally it possesses all the fea­tures of a"primary:'~member. This clash of the structural and semantic aspects of detached constructions produces the desired effect—forcing the reader to interpret the logical connections between the component parts of the sentence. Logical ties between them always exist in spite of the absence of syntactical indicators. In the English language detached constructions are generally used in the belles-lettres prose style and mainly with words that have some explanatory function, for example:"June stood in front, fending off this idle curiosity — a little bit of a thing, as somebody said, 'all hair and spirit'..."(Galsworthy)