4.2. The notion of a functional style as viewed by traditional Russian and Soviet stylistics

One of the basic categories of traditional stylistics, which dominated mostly in Russia and the former Soviet Union, is the notion of the functional style of language.

There exist many definitions of a functional style of language (FS) given by various writers on the subject.

Thus, I.R.Galperin [1977: 249] gives the following definition of the functional style:

“A FS is a patterned variety of literary text characterised by the greater or lesser typification of its constituents, supra-phrasal units (SPU), in which the choice and arrangement of independent and interwoven language media are calculated to secure the purport of the communication”.

For practical reasons of text analysis in translation we will reword this definition as follows:

“A functional style (FS) of language is a system of language means which serves a definite aim of communication”.

It is also assumed by I.R.Galperin [see: ibid.] that each FS is a relatively stable system at the given stage of development of the literary language, but it changes from one historical period to another. I.R.Galperin refers the notion of a functional style only to the written literary standard of language [Galperin 1977: 249], while other authors [see Арнольд 1981: 245; Брандес, Провоторов 2003: 92-97; Кожина 1977: 157; Мороховский, Воровьева, Лихошерст, Тимошенко 1991: 244-245] also list the colloquial style among the functional styles of language and speech. Whatever the academic argument may be, we will not discuss the colloquial style of language at length here, because professional translators and interpreters seldom have to translate or interpret colloquial discourse (unless it is imbedded into fictional texts) but mostly deal with written or oral literary discourse. No doubt that research into translation of fictional discourse (including colloquial discourse) is an important domain of translation studies, however this book focuses mostly on the analysis of literary non-fictional texts (types of discourse) leaving in-depth fictional discourse analysis for further investigation by other scholars.

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. The scientific style.

2. The official and business style.

3. The publisictic style.

4. The style of belles-lettres.

5. The colloquial and everyday (разговорно-бытовой стиль) style.

Professor Morokhovsky A.M. [Стилистика английского языка: 244-245] and the group of other authors, being guided by the differences between non-fictional (both oral and written) and fictional (both oral and written) functional types of languages, suggest defining functional styles at three levels: at the level of the language stylistics, at the level of speech activity stylistics and at the level of speech stylistics [Стилистика английского языка: 238-247]. This approach gives grounds to this group of authors to single out the following styles at the level of speech activity [op. cit.: 244-245] :

1. The official and business style (официально-деловой стиль);

2. The scientific and professional style (научно-профессиональный стиль);

3. The publisictic style (пулицистический стиль);

4. The literary colloquial style (литературно-разговорный стиль);

5. The familiar (unceremonious) colloquial style (фамильяно-разговорный стиль).

I.V. Arnold [Арнольд 1981: 245] singles out six functional styles in languages, namely:

1) The scientific (academic) style;

2) The colloquial style;

3) The official and business style;

4) The poetic style;

5) The oratorical style;

6) The publicistic style.

Thus, the survey given above, shows that there is no universal approach to singling out functional styles of languages.