1. The problems of style and stylistics.

The word style is derived from the Latin word “stilus” which meant a short stick used by the Romans for writing. Now the word “style” is used in so many senses that it has become a breeding ground for ambiguity: it is used to reveal the correspondence between thought and expression; it frequently denotes an individual manner of making use of language.

“Style is a contextually restricted linguistic variation” (Enkvist)

“Style is a selection of non-distinctive features of language” (L. Bloomfield)

It follows then that the term “style”, being ambiguous, needs a restricting adjective to denote what particular aspect of style we intend to deal with. It’s suggested here that the term individual style should be applied to that sphere of linguistic and literary science. Individual style is a unique combination of language units, EMs and SDs peculiar to a given writer, which makes that writer’s works or even utterances easily recognizable.

The speech of an individual which is characterized by peculiarities typical of that particular individual is called an idiolect. The idiolect should be distinguished from that we call individual style, inasmuch as the word “style”, presupposes a deliberate choice.

The norm – is the invariant of the phonemic , morphological, lexical and suntactical patterns circulating in language-in-action at the given period of time.

Stylistic, sometimes called linguo-stylistics, is a branch of general linguistics. It deals mainly with two interdependent tasks: a) the investigation of the inventory of special language media which by their ontological features secure the desirable effect of the utterance and b) certain types of texts (discourse) which due to the choice and arrangement of language means are distinguished by the pragmatic aspect of the communication. The types of texts that are distinguished by the pragmatic aspect by the pragmatic aspect of communication are called functional styles of language (FS); the special media of language which secure the desirable effect of the utterance are called stylistic devices (SD) and expressive means (EM).

The first field of investigation, i.e. SDs and EMs, necessarily touches upon such general language problems as the aesthetic function of language, synonymous ways of rendering one and the same idea, emotional colouring in language, the interrelation between language and thought, and the individual manner of an author in making use of language.

The second field, i.e. functional styles, cannot avoid discussion of such most general linguistic issues as written and oral varieties of language, the notion of the literary (standard) language, the constituents of texts larger than the sentence, and the generative aspect of literary texts.

Functional style is a system interrelated language means which serves a definite aim in communication. A FS is thus to be regarded as the product of a certain concrete task set by the sender of the message. FSs appear mainly in the literary standard of a language.

In the English literary standard five major FSs are distinguished:

1. The language of belles-lettres;

1. the language style of poetry,

2. the language style of emotive prose,

3. the lang. style of drama.

1. The language of publicistic literature;

1. the lang. style of oratory,

2. the lang. style of essays,

3. the lang. style of journalistic articles.

1. The language of newspapers;

   1. the lang. style of brief news items and communiqués,

   2. the lang. style of headlines,

   3. the lang. style of notices and advertisements.

2. The language of scientific prose;

   1. the lang. style of humanitarian sciences,

   2. the lang. style of “exact” sciences,

   3. the lang. style of popular scientific prose.

3. The language of official documents.

   1. the lang, style of business documents,

   2. the lang, style of of legal documents,

   3. the lang, style of military documents.

3. The difference between the literary and colloquial vocabulary.

The whole of the word-stock of the English language is divided into three main layers: the literary layer, the neutral layer and the colloquial layer. The literary and the colloquial layers contain a number of subgroups each of which has a property it shares with all the subgroups within the layer.

The literary vocabulary consists of the following groups of words: 1. common literary; 2. terms and learned words; 3. poetic words; 4. archaic words; 5. barbarisms and foreign words; 6. literary coinages including nonce-words.

The colloquial words falls into the following groups: 1. common colloquial words; 2. slang; 3. jargonisms; 4. professional words; 5. dialectal words; 6. vulgar words; 7. colloquial coinages.

*The common literary, neutral and common colloquial words are grouped under the term standard English vocabulary.

Common literary words are chiefly used in writing and in polished speech. Literary words are easily differentiated from the colloquial ones. The reason for this lies in certain objective features of the literary layer of words, though it’s difficult to say what are these objective features are, as yet no objective criteria have been worked out. But one of them undoubtedly is that literary units stand in opposition to colloquial units. (kid-infant, go on-proceed). These synonyms are not only stylistic but ideographic as well, i.e. there is a definite, though slight, semantic difference between words. The main distinction between synonyms remains stylistic, though this stylistic difference may be of various kinds: it may lie in the emotional tension connoted in a word, or in the sphere of application, or in the degree of the quality denoted. Colloquial words are always more emotionally coloured than literary ones.

Both literary and colloquial words have their upper and lower ranges. The lower range of the literary words approaches the neutral layer and has a markedly obvious tendency to pass into layers; the same can be said of the upper range of the colloquial layer. It is here that the process interpenetration of the stylistic strata becomes most apparent. Still the extremes remain antagonistic and therefore are often used to bring about a collision of manners of speech for special stylistic purposes.

Some of the lexical items belonging to the stratum of common colloquial vocabulary are close to the non-standard colloquial groups such as jargonisms, professionalisms, etc. These are on the border-line between the common colloquial vocabulary and the special colloquial or non-standard vocabulary.