Stylistic neutrality and stylistic colouring

There are two problems – 1) that of the norm and neutrality and 2) stylistic colouring.

Most scholars abroad and in this country think that "style" may be defined as a deviation from the lingual norm. It means that what is stylistically relevant or stylistically coloured is a departure from the norm of a given national language (G. Leech, M.Riffaterre, M.Halliday, R. Jacobson and others).

Some scholars object to the use of the term "norm". Thus Y.M. Skrebnev claims the existence of a variety of sublanguages within a national language, so he says that each sublanguage has a norm of its own.

E.g.: the sentence "I haven't ever done anything", compared to "I ain't never done nothing" is not the norm itself but conforms to (соответствует) the literary norm.

The sentence "I ain't never done nothing" deviates from the literary norm, from standard English but comforms to the standards of the uncultivated population who have their own idea of the norm. So Skrebnev claims there are as many norms as there are sublanguages.

In fact, what we often call "the norm" in terms of Stylistics is "neutrality". Units belonging to all the sublanguages are stylistically neutral. Thus we observe an opposition of stylistically coloured specific elements to stylistically neutral non-specific elements. If we know in what type of communication certain units may be used, so we have the idea of what stylistic colouring is.

On hearing "I don't know nothing" we compare it with standard forms of English and pass judgement on what we have heard or read.

The majority of the words are neutral. Stylistically-coloured words are – bookish, solemn, poetic, official or colloquial, rustic, dialectal, vulgar.

Within the stylistically coloured words there is another opposition between formal vocabulary and informal.