FUNCTIONAL STYLES

FUNCTIONAL STYLES

Functional Styles in the English Language

Functional styles in linguistics refer to systems of interrelated language means used for specific communicative purposes. Every style serves a certain function in society — whether it is scientific, literary, journalistic, or official. Understanding these styles helps learners use English appropriately in various contexts, from academic writing to creative expression.

Classification of Functional Styles

According to I. R. Galperin, there are five main functional styles in modern English:

• Belles-Lettres style
• Publicistic style
• Newspaper style
• Scientific prose style
• Official document style

Each of these styles has its own language means, vocabulary, and stylistic devices that reflect the purpose and audience of the text.

Belles-Lettres Style

The term “belles-lettres” covers three sub-styles: poetry, emotive prose, and drama. Its main function is aesthetic and cognitive — it informs the reader and simultaneously provides artistic pleasure. The poetic sub-style is characterized by rhythm, rhyme, and imagery. Emotive prose combines literary and conversational elements, reflecting emotional tone and individual author style. Drama relies on dialogues, stage remarks, and stylized language close to spoken English.

Publicistic Style

The publicistic style is used in speeches, essays, and articles aimed at influencing public opinion. Its function is both informative and persuasive. It combines logic with emotional appeal and is widely used in newspapers, magazines, oratorical speeches, and media commentaries. The oratorical sub-style emphasizes rhetoric and persuasion; the essay sub-style reflects the author’s individuality and creativity.

Newspaper Style

Newspaper style serves the purpose of informing the public about current events. Its most concise form is the headline, which summarizes and evaluates the news. Common features include political and economic terminology, abbreviations, clichés, and neologisms. The style tends to use complex sentences and specific word order to achieve clarity and conciseness.

Scientific Prose Style

The scientific style aims at describing phenomena objectively and logically. It focuses on precision, clarity, and logical sequence. Specialized vocabulary, formal syntax, and lack of emotional coloring are key features. This style is found in research papers, textbooks, scientific journals, and conference presentations.

Official Document Style

The official style (also called “officialese”) is used in business, legal, diplomatic, and military communication. It is characterized by formality, conventionality, and absence of emotion. Sentences often include complex structures and enumerations. Documents in this style follow strict norms, ensuring clarity and legal precision.

Essential Features of Functional Styles

• Each style uses specific expressive means and stylistic devices suitable for its function.
• Emotional coloring varies: scientific and official styles are unemotional, while belles-lettres and publicistic are expressive.
• The author’s individual style can emerge within general stylistic norms.

Examples (for comparison)

• Belles-Lettres: “The moonlight whispered secrets to the sea.” (Poetic imagery)
• Scientific Prose: “The moon reflects sunlight due to its surface composition.” (Objective description)
• Publicistic: “The nation looks to the moon as a symbol of progress.” (Emotional appeal)

Conclusion

Functional styles reveal how language adapts to different communicative goals. From the beauty of poetry to the precision of science, each style reflects a unique balance between form and function. Mastering these styles allows language users to express ideas effectively in any social, academic, or professional context.

=== Taqdimot 1 ===
FUNCTIONAL STYLES
=== Taqdimot 2 ===
Classification of functional style
Table of contents
01
02
Types of styles
03
Conclusion
=== Taqdimot 3 ===
Classifications of functional styles
1) The aesthetic function of language.
It may be seen in works of art- poetry, imaginative prose, fiction, but works of science, technical instruction or business correspondence have no aesthetic value.
2) Synonymous ways of rendering one and the same idea.
The possibility of choice of using different words in similar situations is connected with the question of style as if the form changes, the contents changes too and the style may be different.
=== Taqdimot 4 ===
3) Expressive means in language
– are employed mainly in the following spheres – poetry, fiction, colloquial speech, speeches but not in scientific articles, business letters and others.
4) Emotional coloring in language.
Many types of texts are highly emotional – declaration of love, funeral oration, poems(verses), but many texts are unemotional or non-emphatic (rules in textbooks).
=== Taqdimot 5 ===
5) A system of special devices called stylistic devices.
The style is formed with the help of characteristic features peculiar to it. Many texts demonstrate various stylistic features: She wears ‘fashion’ = what she wears is fashionable or is just the fashion metonymy.
6) An author’s individual manner in using the individual style of speaking and writing must be investigated with the help of common rules and generalization.
=== Taqdimot 6 ===
I.R. Galperin distinguishes five styles in present-day English:
I. Belles-Lettres style
II. Publicistic style
III. Newspaper functional style
IV. Scientific prose V. Official document style
Types of styles
=== Taqdimot 7 ===
The term “Belles-lettres» is generic for 3 substyles:- poetry;- emotive prose;- drama; The Belles-lettres style has its own specific function which is double-phoned. Besides, informing the reader, it expresses the reader aesthetically. Its function is aesthetic-cognitive, cognitive on the one hand and receiving pleasure on the other. Poetry. Peculiarities – rhythm and rhyme. As a SD rhythm is a combination of the ideal metrical scheme and its variations governed by the standard.
=== Taqdimot 8 ===
Emotive prose is a combination of literary variants of the language and colloquial, which is presented by the speech of the characters which is stylized that means it has been made «literature like» and some elements of conversational English were made used. Emotive prose allows the use of elements of other styles but the author changes them and fulfils a certain function. SDs used: in emotive prose style are represented speech and detached constructions.
=== Taqdimot 9 ===
Drama – the language of plays mainly consists of dialogues. The author’s speech is in the form of stage remarks. Any presentation of a play is an aesthetic procedure. The language of a play has the following peculiarities:
it is stylized (retains the modus of literary English); – it presents the variety of spoken language;
it has redundancy of information caused by necessity to amplify the utterance;
monologue is never interrupted;
character’s utterances are much longer than in ordinary conversation;
=== Taqdimot 10 ===
The Publicistic style is used in public speeches and printed public works which are addressed to a broad audience and devoted to important social or political events, public problems of cultural or moral character. Unlike other formal styles, the publicist style has spoken varieties, in particular, the oratorical sub-style. The development of radio and television has brought into being a new spoken variety – the radio and television commentary. The other two are the essay and articles in newspapers, journals and magazines.
=== Taqdimot 11 ===
The oratorical style is the oral subdivision of the publicistic style. The most obvious purpose of oratory is persuasion, and it requires eloquence. This style is evident in speeches on political and social problems of the day, in orations and addresses on solemn occasions as public weddings, funerals and jubilees, in sermons and debates and also in the speeches of counsel and judges in courts of law.
The sphere of application of oratory is confined to appeal to an audience and therefore crucial issues in such spheres as science, art, or business relations are not touched upon.
=== Taqdimot 12 ===
Nowadays an essay is usually a kind of feature article in a magazine or newspaper. Essays are written commonly by one and the same writer or journalist, who has cultivated his own individual style. Some essays, depending on the writer’s individuality, are written in a highly emotional manner resembling the style of emotive prose, others resemble scientific prose and the terms review, memoir, or treatise are more applicable to certain more exhaustive studies.
=== Taqdimot 13 ===
Irrespective of the character of the magazine and the divergence of subject matter – whether it is political, literary, popular-scientific or satirical, all the features of publistic style are to be found in any article. The character of the magazine as well as the subject chosen affects the choice and use of stylistic devices. There are popular scientific articles, satirical articles, political magazine articles or newspaper articles. Literary reviews stand closer to essay both by their content and by their linguistic form. More abstract words of logical meaning are used in them, they more often resort to emotional language and less frequently to traditional set expressions.
=== Taqdimot 14 ===
Newspaper style was the last of all the styles of written literary English to be recognized as a specific form of writing standing apart from other forms. The most concise form of newspaper informational is the headline. The headlines of news items, apart from giving information about the subject-matter, also carry a considerable amount of appraisal (the size and arrangement of the headline and the use of emotionally coloured words, thus indicating the interpretation of the facts in the news item that follows.
=== Taqdimot 15 ===
Brief news items. The function of a brief news item is to inform the reader. It states only facts without giving comments. Newspaper style has its specific vocabulary features and is characterized by an extensive use in special political and economic terms, non-term political vocabulary, newspaper cliché, abbreviations and neologisms. The following grammatical peculiarities of brief news items are of paramount importance and may be regarded as grammatical parameters of newspaper style. They are complex sentences with a developed system of clauses, verbal constructions, syntactical complexes, attributive noun groups and specific word order.
=== Taqdimot 16 ===
General features of the newspaper style are:
1) Newspaper language comprises a lot of abstract, economical and political words;
2) It is characterized by newspaper phraseology and cliches;
3) Abbreviations usually stand for geographical names and for the names of some well-known personalities;
4) Neologisms first appear in newspapers;
5) Lexical and syntactical stylistic devices – irony, pun, allusions – which are usually trite; vocabulary comprises different groups – slangy words, archaisms etc.
=== Taqdimot 17 ===
The aim of the scientific prose style is to describe a phenomenon of science precisely, to reveal all the peculiarities of subject in question. The language of scientific prose is determined by a desire to prove hypothesis, to state laws, define concepts, etc. Hence the main problem is to establish a clear and logical progression of ideas and define the subject-matter precisely. For the purpose of precision the clarity, logical coherence, specific vocabulary and special syntax are employed.
=== Taqdimot 18 ===
Linguistic science points out that the most important thing in stylistics is the interrelation of the means of expression and the subject-matter of the expressive means of a language and the idea expressed. When speaking of the expressive means of language, we think of the arrangement of sentences, clauses, words, and the choice of words which not only convey the idea to the reader or listener, but simultaneously provoke the desired emotional reaction from him. The core of any popular scientific text is terminology, the main characteristics of which are the aspiration for unambiguity and absence of emotional expressive evaluative connotations.
=== Taqdimot 19 ===
Official documents are written in a formal, “cold” or matter-of-fact style of speech. The style of official documents, or ‘officialese’ as it is sometimes called, is not homogeneous and is represented by the following sub-styles, or varieties:
1. The language of business documents
2. The language of legal documents
3. The language of diplomacy
4. The language of military documents.
=== Taqdimot 20 ===
General features of the style of English of documents’ writing are the following:
-conventionality of expression;
-absence of emotiveness;
-encoded character of the language system (including abbreviations);
-general syntactical mode of combining several pronouncements into one sentence. The form of a document itself is informative because it tells something about the matter dealt with. From the viewpoint of its stylistic structure, the whole document is one sentence. It looks like separate, shaped clauses often divided by commas or semicolons, and not by full stops, often numbered.
=== Taqdimot 21 ===
Functional Style is a system of interrelated language means serving a definite aim in communication. It is the coordination of the language means and stylistic devices which shapes the distinctive features of each style and not the language means or stylistic devices themselves. Each style, however, can be recognized by one or more leading features which are especially conspicuous. Every functional style of language is marked by a specific use of language means, thus establishing its own norms which, however, are subordinated to the norm-invariant and which do not violate the general notion of the literary norm.
=== Taqdimot 22 ===
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