2. Functional styles in Modern English.

The literary communication, most often materialized in the written form, is not homogeneous, and proceeding from its function we speak of different functional styles. At present most scholars differentiate such functional styles: scientific, official, publicist, newspaper, belles-letters.

Scientific style is employed in professional communication. Its feature is the abundance of terms denoting objects, phenomena and processes characteristic of some practical field of science and technique. Scientific style is also known for its precision, clarity and logical cohesion which is responsible for the repeated use of such clichés as: “Proceeding from”, “As it was said above”, “In connection with”.

Official style, or style of official documents, is the most conservative one. 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. the language of diplomacy;

4. the language of military documents.

It preserves cast-iron forms of structuring and uses syntactical constructions and words long known as archaic and not observed anywhere else. Addressing documents and official letters, signing them, expressing the reasons and considerations leading to the subject of the document – all this is strictly regulated both lexically and syntactically. All emotiveness and subjective modality are completely banned out of this style.

Publicist style. In ancient Greece it was practiced mainly in its oral form and was best known as oratoric style. Nowadays political, ideological, ethical, social beliefs and statements of the addresser are prevailingly expressed in the written form, which was labeled publicist in accordance with the name of the corresponding genre and its practitioners. Publicist style is famous for its explicit pragmatic function of persuasion directed at influencing the reader and shaping his views, in accordance with the argumentation of the author. We find in publicist style a blend of the rigorous logical reasoning, reflecting the objective state of things, and a strong subjectivity reflecting the author’s personal feelings and emotions towards the discussed subject.

Newspaper style is found in newspapers. You should not conclude that everything published in a newspaper should be referred to the newspaper style. When we mention newspaper style, we mean informative materials, characteristic of newspaper only and not found in other publications. To attract the reader’s attention to the news, special graphical means are used. British and American papers are notorious for the change of type, specific headlines, space ordering. We find here a large proportion of dates and personal names and countries, institutions, individuals. Newspaper style has its specific vocabulary features and is characterized by an extensive use of:

1. special political and economic terms (president, election);

2. non-term political vocabulary (nation, crisis, agreement, member);

3. newspaper cliches (pressing problem, danger of war, pillars of society);

4. abbreviations (NATO, EEC);

5. neologisms.

Belles-letters style may be called the richest register of communication: besides its own language means belles-letters style uses the other styles too. In numerous works of literary art we find elements of scientific, official functional types of speech. According to I.R. Galperin, this is a generic term for three substyles: the language of poetry; emotive prose (the language of fiction); the language of the drama. Each of these substyles has certain common features, and each of them enjoys some individuality. The common features of the substyles are the following:

1. The aesthetico-cognitive function (a function which aims at the cognitive process, which secures the gradual unfolding of the idea to the reader and at the same time calls forth a feeling of pleasure and satisfaction which a reader experiences because he is able to penetrate into the author's idea and to form his own conclusions).

2. Definite linguistic features:

• Genuine, not trite, imagery, achieved by purely linguistic devices.

• The use of words in different meanings, greatly influenced by the lexical environment.

• A vocabulary which will reflect to a certain degree the author's personal evaluation of things or phenomena.

• A peculiar individual selection of vocabulary and syntax.

• The introduction of the typical features of colloquial language to a full degree (drama), to a lesser degree (in prose), to a slight degree (poetry).