Unit 4 texts of official and business documents in the focus of discourse analysis in translation main points

4.3. Major functional styles and substyles as viewed by traditional Russian and Soviet stylistics

Scholars of traditional stylistics have different approaches to distinguishing functional styles of languages. Thus, I.R. Galperin writes: “What we here call functional styles are also called registers or discourses” [Galperin 1977: 33]. In the English literary standard I.R. Galperin distinguishes the following functional styles and substyles [Galperin 1977: 33-34]:

1. 
   The language of belles-lettres with the following substyles: the language style of poetry; the language style of emotive prose; the language style of drama.
   
2. 
   The language of publicistic literature with the following substyles: the language style of the oratory (the oratorical style); the language style of essays; the language style of feature articles in newspapers and journals.
   
3. 
   The language of newspapers with the following substyles: the language style of brief news items and communiqués; the language style of newspaper headings; the language style of notices and advertisements.
   
4. 
   The language of scientific prose with the following substyles: the language style of humanitarian sciences; the language style of “exact” sciences; the language style of popular scientific prose.
   
5. 
   The language of official documents with the following substyles: the language style of business documents; the language style of legal documents; the language style of military documents.
   

N.M. Kozhina has a somewhat different approach to distinguishing functional styles of languages and in particular those of the Russian language [Кожина 1977: 157-215]. The differences mostly concern the language of the puplicistic literature, into which N.M. Kozhina includes informative news items, newspaper headings and advertisements [op. cit.: 179-196], i.e. those types of discourse, which I.R. Galperin labels separately as “the language of newspapers”, and “the colloquial style of language”, which N.M. Kozhina puts as a separate language style, while I.R. Galperin (as well as some other authors) considers colloquial discourse to be outside the language functional styles system. He believes that colloquial style belongs to the spoken variety of language [Galperin 1977: 35] and should be regarded separately, while “functional styles appear mainly in the literary standard of a language” [op. cit.: p. 33]. Thus, N.M. Kozhina distinguishes the following functional styles of languages (on the basis on Russian):

1.