Экзамен по стилистике Stylistics as a science and style as a main stylistic category

Functional styles (FSs) of the English language
A functional style of language is a system of interrelated language means which serves a definite aim in communi­cation.
It can be regarded as the product of a certain task set by the sender of the message. Func­tional styles appear mainly in the literary standard of a language.A FS is a patterned variety of literary text characterized by thegreater or lesser typification of its constituents, supra-phrasal units(SPU), in which the choice and arrangement of interdependent andinterwoven language media are calculated to secure the purport of thecommunication.
The literary standard of the English language is not homogeneous. It has fallen into several subsystems each of which has acquired its own peculiarities which are typical of the given functional style.
Functional styles are the product of the development of the written variety of language. Each FS may be characterized by a number of distinctive features, leading or subordinate, constant or changing, obligatory or optional. Most of the FSs, however, are perceived as independent wholes due to a peculiar combination and interrelation of features common to all (especially when taking into account syntactical arrangement) with the leading ones of each FS.
What we here call "functional styles" are also called registers or discourses.
Different classifications of the FSs
Functional styles are differentiated according to the function of communication. Every FS has its own primary object to pursue: to convey the information, to affect the feeling and mentality of the audience, to create a poetic work. Accordingly FSs are roughly divided into literary and colloquial. Among literary styles most scholars single out poetic, scientific, official and newspaper styles.
There are some classifications of the functional styles.
In the English lit­erary standard I. Galperin distinguishes 5 major functional styles, each of which is subdivided into a number of sub-styles. These represent varieties of the abstract in­variant. Each variety has basic features common to all the varieties of the given FS and peculiar fea­tures typical of this variety alone. Still a sub-style can in some cases deviate so far from the invariant that in its extreme it may even break away.
We clearly perceive the following sub-styles of the five FSs:
The belles-lettres FS has the following sub-styles:
-the language style of poetry
-the language style of emotive prose
-the language style of drama
The publicistic FS comprises the following sub-styles:
-the language style of oratory
-the language style of essays
-the language style of feature articles in newspapers and journals
The newspaper FS falls into:
-the language style of brief news items and communiqués
-the language style of newspaper headings
-the language style of notices and advertisements
The scientific prose FS also has three divisions:
-the language style of humanitarian sciences
-the language style of "exact" sciences
-the language style of popular scientific prose
The official documents FScan be divided into four varieties:
-the language style of diplomatic documents
-the language style of business documents
-the language style of military documents
-the language style of legal documents
There is no unanimous opinion on the problem of distinguishing the belles-style as a separate one on the ground that fiction is in fact individual creative work of a writer who makes use of all the subsystems of the language – both the norm with its functional styles and regional and social varieties (slang, jargon, dialects). Colloquial style is also a problem – it is a controversial issue, as it may include different features of different styles.
Thus, colloquial styleis mostly used in dialogs and differs from situation to situation depending on the participants in the act of communication and its form. Colloquial style can be formal or friendly. Sociolinguistic factors predetermine the use of style-forming means in every particular case. Colloquial style is spontaneous which precludes the careful choice of words and phrases and or the use of elaborate grammatical structures. There are two contradictory tendencies of colloquial style arising from conditions of communication. One is for compression of information, resulting in all kinds of incomplete statements, and the other is for redundancy of expression.
Compression affects all the levels of the language:
-reduced forms of auxiliary verbs: ain’t, you’d better
-omission of obvious parts of the sentence;
-simplified syntactical structure of the sentences;
-the use of words of general meaning (thing, stuff, affair)
The reverse tendency is for redundancy of expression:
-the use of words without any informative value,such as “I mean”, “the fact is”;
-the use of intensifiers with expressive, emotional and evaluative connotations often indistinguishable from vulgarisms thou used in a euphemistic form: “I began to sing like a bally nightingale”, “One of those blighted tea-and-bunshops.
The classification of FSs is not a simple matter and any discussion of it is bound to reflect more than one angle of vision. ProfessorBudagov, for example, singles out only two main functional styles: 1) the language of science
2) the language of emotive literature.