Newspaper style.
includes informative materials: news in brief, headlines, ads, additional articles. But not
everything published in the paper can be included in N.S. we mean publicist essays, feature
articles, scient. Reviews are not N.S. to attract the readers attention special means are used
by british & am. Papers ex: specific headlines, space ordering. We find here a large
proportion of dates, personal names of countries, institutions, individuals. To achieve an
effect of objectivity in rendering some fact or event most of info is published anonymously,
without the name of newsman who supplied it, with little or no subjective modality. But the
position of the paper becomes clear from the choice not only of subj. matter but also of
words denoting international or domestic issues. Substyles. To understand the language
peculiarities of English newspaper style it will be sufficient to analyze the following basic
newspaper features:1) brief news items;2) advertisements and announcements;3)
headlines; Brief items: its function is to inform the reader. It states only facts
without giving comments. The vocabulary used is neutral and common literary.
Specific features are: a) special political and economic terms; b) non-term
political vocabulary; c) newspaper clichés; d) abbreviations; e) neologisms.
Publicist style. (oratory, speeches, essays, articles) the style is a perfect ex.
Of historical changeability of stylistic differentiation of discourses. In Greece it
was practiced in oral form which was named P. in accordance with the name of
its corresponding genre. PS is famous for its explicit pragmatic function of
persuasion directed at influencing the reader & shaping his views in accordance
with the argumentation of the author. We find in PS a blend of the rigorous
logical reasoning, reflecting the objective state of things & a strong subjectivity
reflecting the authors personal feelings and emotions towards the discussed
subject. Substyles: The oratory essays, journalistic articles, radio and TV
commentary. Oratory. It makes use of a great hummber of expressive means
to arouse and keep the public's interest: repetition, gradation, antithesis,
rhetorical questions, emotive words, elements of colloquial speech. Radio and
TV commentary is less impersonal and more expressive and emotional. The
essay is very subjective and the most colloquial of the all substyles of the
publicistic style. It makes use of expressive means and tropes. The
journalistic articles are impersonal.
Belles-lettres style.
(the style of fiction) embraces:1)poetry; 2)drama; 3)emotive prose. B-l style or
the style of imaginative literature may be called the richest register of
communication: besides its own lan-ge means which are not used in any other
sphere of communication, b-l st. makes ample use of other styles too, for in
numerous works of literary art we find elements of scientific, official and other
functional types of speech. Besides informative and persuasive functions, also
found in other functional styles, the b-l style has a unique task to impress the
reader aesthetically. The form becomes meaningful and carries additional info.
Boundless possibilities of expressing one's thoughts and feelings make the b-l
style a highly attractive field of research for a linguist.
The belles-lettres style, in each of its concrete representations, fulfils the
aesthetic function, which fact singles this style out of others and gives grounds
to recognize its systematic uniqueness, i.e. charges it with the status if an
autonomous functional style.
The subject of stylistics. Its connection with other disciplines.
branch of general linguistics. It has mainly with two tasks: St-s – is regarded as
a lang-ge science which deals with the results of the act of communication.
There are 2 basic objects of st-s: - stylistic devices and figures of speech; functional styles. Branches of st-s: - Lexical st-s – studies functions of direct
and figurative meanings, also the way contextual meaning of a word is realized
in the text. L.S. deals with various types of connotations – expressive,
evaluative, emotive; neologisms, dialectal words and their behavior in the text.
- Grammatical st-s – is subdivided into morphological and syntactical. Morph-l s.
views stylistic potential of gram-l categories of dif-t parts of speech. Potential of
the number, pronouns…- Syntactical s. studies syntactic, expressive means,
word order and word combinations, dif-t types of sentences and types of
syntactic connections. Also deals with origin of the text, its division on the
paragraphs, dialogs, direct and indirect speech, the connection of the sentences,
types of sentences. - Phonostylistics – phonetical organization of prose and
poetic texts. Here are included rhythm, rhythmical structure, rhyme,
alliteration, assonance and correlation of the sound form and meaning. Also
studies deviation in normative pronunciation. - Functional S (s. of decoding) –
deals with all subdivisions of the language and its possible use (newspaper,
colloquial style). Its object - correlation of the message and communicative
situation.
Scientific Prose Style
The style of scientific prose has 3 subdivisions:1) the style of humanitarian
sciences; 2) the style of "exact" sciences; 3) the style of popular scientific
prose. Its function is to work out and ground theoretically objective knowledge
about reality. The aim of communication is to create new concepts, disclose the
international laws of existence. The peculiarities are: objectiveness; logical
coherence, impersonality, unemotional character, exactness. The scientific prose
style consists mostly of ordinary words which tend to be used in their primary
logical meaning. Emotiveness depends on the subject of investigation but
mostly scientific prose style is unemotional. Grammar: The logical presentation
and cohesion of thought manifests itself in a developed feature of scientific
syntax is the use of established patterns. - postulatory; - formulative; argumentative; The impersonal and objective character of scientific prose style
is revealed in the frequent use of passive constructions, impersonal sentences.
Personal sentences are more frequently used in exact sciences. In humanities
we may come across constructions but few. Some features of the style in the
text are: - use of quotations and references; - use of foot-notes helps to
preserve the logical coherence of ideas. Scientific popular style has the following
peculiarities: emotive words, elements of colloquial style.
The object of stylistics.
The object is a piece of reality, reflected, interpreted, transformed in the mind
of a student. The object of stylistics is style. There is a widely held view that
style is the correspondence between thought and expression.
Style is a
subsystem of the language, the elements of which are capable of carrying some
additional information about the reality, connected with the human factor.
Approaches: philosophical – 1. similarity of typical features, 2. difference in sets
of features; philological – 1. the norm/the deviation from the norm, 2. the effect
of the utterance upon the addressee (pragmatic), 3. embellishment
(ornamentation) (mechanistic).
The Style of Official Documents
1) Language of business letters; 2) Language of legal documents; 3)
Language of diplomacy; 4) Language of military documents; The aim:
1. to reach agreement between two contracting parties; 2. to state the
conditions binding two parties in an understanding. Each of substyles
of official documents makes use of special terms. Legal documents:
military documents, diplomatic documents. The documents use set
expressions inherited from early Victorian period. This vocabulary is
conservative. Legal documents contain a large proportion of formal
and archaic words used in their dictionary meaning. In diplomatic and
legal documents many words have Latin and French origin. There are a
lot of abbreviations and conventional symbols. The most noticeable
feature of grammar is the compositional pattern. Every document has
its own stereotyped form. The form itself is informative and tells you
with what kind of letter we deal with. Business letters contain:
heading, addressing, salutation, the opening, the body, the closing,
complimentary clause, the signature. Syntactical features of business
letters are - the predominance of extended simple and complex
sentences, wide use of participial constructions, homogeneous
members. Morphological peculiarities are passive constructions, they
make the letters impersonal. There is a tendency to avoid pronoun
reference. Its typical feature is to frame equally important factors and
to divide them by members in order to avoid ambiguity of the wrong
interpretation.
Functional Styles of the English Language
According to Galperin: Functional Style is a system of interrelated
language means serving a definite aim in communication. It is the
coordination of the language means and stylistic devices which shapes
the distinctive features of each style and not the language means or
stylistic devices themselves. Each style, however, can be recoquized
by one or more leading features which are especially conspicuous. For
instance the use of special terminology is a lexical characteristics of
the style of scientific prose, and one by which it can easily be
recognized. Classification: 1. The Belles - Lettres Functional Style. a)
poetry; b) emotive prose; c) drama; 2. Publicistic Functional Style, a)
oratory; b) essays; c) articles in newspapers and magazines; 3. The
Newspaper Functional Style. a) brief news items; b) advertisments and
announcements; c) headlines; 4. The Scientific Prose Style. a) exact
sciences; b) humanitarian sciences; c) popular- science prose; 5. The
Official Documents Functional Style. a) diplomatic documents; b)
business letters; c) military documents; d) legal documents;
Expressive means and stylistic devices
Stylistics studies the special media of language which are called
stylistic devices and expressive means. Expressive means and
stylistic devices form three large groups of phonetic, lexical,
syntactical means and devices. Each group is further subdivided
according to the principle, purpose and function of a mean or a device
in an utterance. Stylistics studies the types of texts which are
distinguished by the pragmatic aspect of the communication and are
called functional styles of language. Expressive means of a
language are those phonetic, morphological, word-building, lexical,
phraseological and syntactical forms which exist in language-as-asystem for the purpose of logical and/or emotional intensification of
the utterance. These intensifying forms have special functions in
making the utterances emphatic. A stylistic device is a conscious and
intentional intensification of some typical structural and/or semantic
property of a language unit (neutral or expressive) promoted to a
generalized status and thus becoming a generative model. A stylistic
device is an abstract pattern, a mould into which any content can be
poured.
Text and discourse
The original words of something written or printed, as opposed to a
paraphrase, translation, revision, or condensation. There are two types
of text: according to channel (oral and written) and according to
structure message (literary, humanistic, scientific-technician, juridical,
administrative, advertising, colloquial and journalistic). Text have got
two properties: coherence and cohesion. Coherence property is to give
the sensation that one speaks of the same thing. Cohesion property is
a group of mechanism to connect the parts of a text. Text is an
semantic, syntactic and pragmatic structure constituted for several
levels of organization. The process of activation of the text by relating
it to a context of use we call discourse. Characteristics: 1.
contextuallity – a unity of represented events, the participants of these
events, attendant circumstances, their background and estimation of
the events by the participants. 2. personality – a concrete interaction
of two individuals; its an act of self-expression in a communicative
situation. 3. processuality – viewing discourse not as a final product
(result), but as a process of alternation of two stages. Generation of
utterances & their interpretation by both communicants in their
common effort to work-out the structure of discourse at every
concrete moment 4. situativity – the correspondence between
discourse & the norms of the language situation, the communicative
situation & sociative situation, provided by the discourse coordinates
by the time space. 5. closeness & completeness.
Foregrounding and its types.
Decoding stylistics investigates the same levels as linguistics – phonetic,
graphical, lexical, grammatical. The basic difference: it studies expressive
means of each level not as isolated devices but as a part of the whole text on
lengthy segments of text. One of the fundamental concepts of DS is
foregrounding. F-g means a specific role that some lang-ge items play in a cert.
context when the reader's attention cannot but be drawn to them. DS laid down
a few principle methods that ensure the effect of F-g. They are: convergence of
expressive means, irradiation, defeated expectancy, coupling, semantic fields,
semi-marked structures, strong position, salient feature. Convergence –
denotes a combin-n of styl.devices promoting the same idea, emotion or
motive; any type of exp.means will make sense styl-ly when treated as a part of
the whole unit (the context, the whole text). Defeated E-y. may be found on
any ling.level. It may be expressed by unusual suffix, zeugma, oxymoron,
paradox…. Coupling. Provides cohesion, consistency & unity of the text form
& content. It may be found on any ling.level. The affinity may be phonetic
(alliteration, assonance, rhyme, rhythm..) & semantic (use of synonyms,
antonyms, root repetition, paraphrase..) & structural (all kinds of parallelism,
syntactical repetition- anadiplosis, framing). Semantic field. It identifies lex.
elements in text segments and the whole work that provide its thematic and
compositional cohesion. Lex. ties relevant to this kind of analysis will include
synonymous and antonymous relations, morphological derivation, relations of
inclusion (various types of hyponymy and entailment), common sense in the
denotative or connotative meanings of different words. Semi-marked
structures is associated with the deviation from the grammatical and lexical
norm. It's an extreme case of defeated expectancy much stronger than low expectancy encountered in a paradox or anti-climax, the unpredictable element is
used contrary to the norm so it produces a very strong emphatic impact.
Word & its meaning
The list and specifications of connotational meanings vary with different
linguistic schools and individual scholars and include such entries as pragmatic
(directed at the perlocutionary effect of utterance), associative (connected,
through individual psychological or linguistic associations, with related and
nonrelated notions), ideological, or conceptual (revealing political, social,
ideological preferences of the user), evaluative (stating the value of the
indicated notion), emotive (revealing the emotional layer of cognition and
perception), expressive (aiming at creating the image of the object in question),
stylistic (indicating "the register", or the situation of the communication). This
structure is constituted of various types of lexical meanings, the major one
being denotational, which informs of the subject of communication; and also
including connotational, which informs about the participants and conditions of
communication. The most essential feature of a word is that it expresses the
concept of a thing, process, phenomenon, naming (denoting) them. Concept is
a logical category, its linguistic counterpart is meaning.