Every style of speech
brings about with it some additional information about the conditions and
peculiarities of communication. The choice of style may depend 1) on particular
relations between the participants of communication (interlocutors) and 2) on a
particular attitude of the speaker to what he says. These two types of
stylistic information will be used below as the basis for the classification of
styles.
From this point of
view, functional styles express the first type of information, i.e. the
relations between the interlocutors. In some situations these relations may be
unrestrained, friendly,
easy-going or intimate, and in that case the speaker chooses the so called informal
style of speech, viz the
colloquial style, which is a lower ' style of speech, characteristic of oral communication. In other situations the
relations between the interlocutors may be restrained , strictly official,
etc., and then the interlocutors try to be deliberately polite, and they choose the so called formal style
(the lofty, bookish style), which is generally characteristic of written language.
The formal style is used in the genres of official or business documents, of
scientific or publicist works. These genres, in their turn, may be further
subdivided into more particular varieties of genres; for example, official
documents may represent an order, instruction, resolution, proceedings of a
meeting, report, application, etc.
It is natural for
speakers to try to avoid any confusion of formal and informal styles within one
text, as such a confusion might give the wrong idea of the relations between
the interlocutors: e.g. a letter to a
person of higher authority cannot begin with words like 'Hi, how are
you doing?', which would bear a sense
of familiarity. But at the same time it is well worth mentioning that there may be samples of speech
(oral or written) which are not
clearly marked by features of any particular style, and which can therefore
be regarded as a "neutral" style, suitable for any communicative
situations.
Besides
the formal and informal functional styles mentioned above (which reflect the
relations between interlocutors), there are
also stylistic characteristics of speech that reflect the attitude of
the speaker to the content of his speech. This second type of stylistic
information concerns the emotional character of speech, viz. the presence or
absence of emotional or evaluative elements. In this respect we can distinguish:
1) an emotionally
coloured style of speech
2)
a deliberately unemotional, or "cold" style of
speech
3)
a neutral style of speech
Emotionally coloured speech
maybe characterized, on the one hand, by a lofty emotional colouring, such as solemn, passionate,
ironic, wrathful, sarcastic,
etc., or, on the other hand, by a lower colouring, such as jocular/humorous,
derogatory,
rude, disapproving, endearing, etc.
The lofty emotional
colouring is characteristic of the publicist/oratory style, while the lower
emotional colouring is typical of colloquial style. The deliberately
unemotional character of speech is typical of the formal ('cold') styles, such as scientific, official or business speech, where
the speaker tends to make his speech impersonal and avoid any emotional
or evaluating elements.
Apart from the two
directly opposed styles — the emotionally coloured and the deliberately
unemotional — there may also be intermediate, stylistically neutral speech,
which is neither emotionally coloured nor deliberately devoid of emotion. Thus,
there may be samples of speech that are neutral both with respect to the
relations between the interlocutors and with respect to the speaker's attitude
toward what he says.
Stylistic
differences of any kind can be expressed by various language means: phonetic,
lexical or grammatical. One of the most vivid means is, naturally, the choice
of vocabulary.
