The Scientific Prose Style, its Substyles and their Peculiarities

The style of scientific prose has 3 subdivisions:

1) the style of humanitarian sciences;

2) the style of "exact" sciences;

3) the style of popular scientific prose.

Its function is to work out and ground theoretically objective knowledge about reality

The aim of communication is to create new concepts, disclose the international laws of existence.

The peculiarities are: objectiveness; logical coherence, impersonality, unemotional character, exactness.

Vocabulary. The use of terms and words used to express a specialized concept in a given branch of science. Terms are not necessarily. They may be borrowed from ordinary language but are given a new meaning.

The scientific prose style consists mostly of ordinary words which tend to be used in their primary logical meaning. Emotiveness depends on the subject of investigation but mostly scientific prose style is unemotional.

Grammar: The logical presentation and cohesion of thought manifests itself in a developed feature of scientific syntax is the use of established patterns.

- postulatory;

- formulative;

- argumentative;

The impersonal and objective character of scientific prose style is revealed in the frequent use of passive constructions, impersonal sentences. Personal sentences are more frequently used in exact sciences. In humanities we may come across constructions but few.

The parallel arrangement of sentences contributes to emphasizing certain points in the utterance.

Some features of the style in the text are:

- use of quotations and references;

- use of foot-notes helps to preserve the logical coherence of ideas.

Humanities in comparison with "exact" sciences employ more emotionally coloured words, fewer passive constructions.

Scientific popular style has the following peculiarities: emotive words, elements of colloquial style

The Style of Official Documents and its Substyles

1) Language of business letters;

2) Language of legal documents;

3) Language of diplomacy;

4) Language of military documents; The aim:

1. to reach agreement between two contracting parties;

2. to state the conditions binding two parties in an understanding. Each of substyles of official documents makes use of special terms. Legal documents: military documents, diplomatic documents. The documents use set expressions inherited from early Victorian period. This vocabulary is conservative. Legal documents contain a large proportion of formal and archaic words used in their dictionary meaning. In diplomatic and legal documents many words have Latin and French origin. There are a lot of abbreviations and conventional symbols.

The most noticable feature of grammar is the compositional pattern. Every document has its own stereotyped form. The form itself is informative and tells you with what kind of letter we deal with.

Business letters contain: heading, addressing, salutation, the opening, the body, the closing, complimentary clause, the signature. Syntactical features of business letters are - the predominance of extended simple and complex sentences, wide use of participial constructions, homogeneous members.

Morphological peculiarities are passive constructions, they make the letters impersonal. There is a tendency to avoid pronoun reference. Its typical feature is to frame equally important factors and to divide them by members in order to avoid ambiguity of the wrong interpretation.

Epithet

is a word or phrase which expresses some quality of a person, thing, idea or phenomenon. It serves to emphasize a certain property or feature. Epithet is of special significance in different kinds of poetry. Each epoch and each genre has its own stock of traditional epithets. Sometimes they are called fixed: “ green wood”, “merry men”, “true love”, “yellow hair”. The choice of epithets is one of the primary characteristics of a poet’s style:

“The flowing Spring leads Sunny Summer,

And yellow Autumn presses near,

Then in its turn comes gloomy Winter

Till smiling Spring appears.” (R.Burns).

Epithet expresses a characteristic of an object, both existing and imaginary. Its basic feature is its emotiveness and subjectivity, that is the characteristic which is attached to the object in order to qualify it. It is always chosen by the speaker himself. In epithet the emotive meaning of the word is foregrounded to suppress its denotational meaning.

Epithet has remained through centuries the most widely used SD. It offers ample opportunities of qualifying every object from the author’s partial and subjective viewpoint. The structure and semantics of epithets are extremely variable. This is explained by their long and wide use.

Semantically we differentiate two main groups: affective (or emotive proper) - this is the biggest group - and figurative (or transferred). Emotive epithets serve to convey the emotional evaluation of the object by the speaker. Most of the qualifying words can be used as affective epithets (“gorgeous”, “nasty”, “magnificent”, atrocious”).

Figurative epithets are metaphors, metonymies and similes which are expressed by adjectives:

”the smiling sun”, “the frowning cloud”, “the sleepless pillow”, “a ghost-like face”, “a dreamlike experience”. These epithets are based on similarity of characteristics of two objects, or nearness of the qualified objects, or their comparison.

In the overwhelming majority of examples epithet is expressed by adjectives, or qualitative adverbs: “his triumphant look” = “he looked triumphantly”. Nouns are used in exclamatory sentences or as post-positive attributes: “You, ostrich!”; “Richard of the Lion Heart”.

Epithets are used singly, in pairs, in chains, in two-step structures, in inverted constructions, as phrase-attributes.

Pairs are represented by two epithets joined by a conjunction or asyndetically: ”wonderful and incomparable beauty”.

Chains (strings) of epithets present a group of homogeneous attributes which vary in number from three up to sometimes twenty and even more: “You are scolding, unjust, abusive, aggravating, bad old creature”.

Epithets are called two-step epithets because the process of qualifying seemingly passes two stages - the qualification of the object and the qualification of the qualification itself: “an unnaturally mild day”, “a pompously majestic female”. They have a fixed structure of “adverb + adjective” model.

Phrase epithets produce an original impression: “the sunshine-in-the-breakfast-room-smell”; “a move-if-you-dare-expression”; “the man-I-saw-yesterday-son”. A semantically self-sufficient word combination or even a whole sentence is turned into a phrase epithet.

Inverted epithets are based on the contradiction between the logical and the syntactical meanings:” this devilish woman”. All inverted epithets are easily transformed into epithets of a more habitual structure. There is no logico-syntactical contradiction in them: “the giant of a man” = “a gigantic man”; “the prude of a woman” = “a prudish woman”. An inverted epithet should not be mixed up with an ordinary of-phrase: “the toy of the girl” and “the toy of a girl”; “the kitten of the woman” and “the kitten of a woman”.

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