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 FS can 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 style is 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.

Arnold’s classification consists of four styles:

1.Poetic style
2.Scientific style
3.Newspaper style
4.Colloquial style
Morokhovsky, Vorobyova, Likhosherst give following classification of style:
1. official business style
2. scientific – professional style
3. publicistic style
4. literary colloquial style
5. familiar colloquial style
Kozhina lists type - forming and socially significant spheres of communication as follows:
1) official

2)scientific

3) artistic

4) publicistic

5) of daily intercourse (=colloquial).

The four major registers (varieties of language relating to different circumstances and purposes) distinguished and fixed in Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English are conversation, fiction, newspaper language, and academic prose. Register distinctions are defined in non-linguistic terms, with respect with situational characteristics such as mode, interactiveness, domain, communicative purpose, and topic.

In many cases registers are institutionalized varieties or text types within a culture, such as novels, letters, editorials, sermons and debates. However, registers can be defined at almost any level of generality. Thus, novels are the sub-register of the broader text variety of fiction. At the same time, novels themselves can be broken down into more detailed categories such as detective novels or historical novels.

When analyzing concrete texts, we discover that the boundaries between them sometimes be­come less and less discernible. Thus, for instance, the signs of difference are sometimes almost imper­ceptible between poetry and emotive prose; between newspaper FS and publicistic FS; between a popular scientific treatise; between an essay and a scientific article. But the extremes are apparent from the ways language units are used both structurally and semantically. The term "language style" in the above classification is used in order to emphasize the idea that the word "style" is applied purely to linguistic data.

While analyzing a text and referring it to a particular style or a substyle, one should bear in mind that style divisions do not coincide in different languages (as a result of tradition, language structure and some other grounds). Thus, a scientific text in English would sound like a popular-scientific one in Russian.