The aims of the Style of Official Documents and its Substyles

1. To reach an 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.

The Style of Official Documents is marked by:

1. Conventionality;

2. Unemotiveness;

3. Encoded character (symbols, abbreviations).

4. A general syntactical mode of combining several pronouncements into one sentence.

5. Formulas of greeting, parting, politeness, gratitude.

The structure of the business letter:

· The heading;

· The reference;

· The date

· The inside address

· The opening salutation

· The body

· The complimentary close

· Enclosure.

It is characterized by special business terminology:

· extra-revenue, taxable capacities, liability to profit taxes;

· Red-tape clichés: I BEG TO INFORM YOU; I BEG TO MOVE;

· Abbreviations: MP, GVT, HMS, LTD.

Dear Sirs:

We are pleased to have received your order of Sept. 15 and would like to welcome you as a new customer of Payton’s Plastics.

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 noticeable 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.

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.

Informal functional styles:

1. Literary Colloquial;

2. Familiar Colloquial;

3. Low Colloquial.

Characteristic features:

1. Economy of expression;

2. Redundancy of language means;

3. Dialogical unity:

o Question – answer unity; “When do you begin? – Tomorrow.”

o Anadiplosis unity; “So you would naturally say … - And mean?”

o Repetition unity; “There’s so much talk of suicide,” he said. – James’ jaw dropped. - “Suicide! What should he do that for?”

o Parallelism unity; “Well, Mr. Desert, do you find reality in politics?” – “Do you find reality in anything?”

Lexical characteristic features:

1. Shortened words, contracted forms of auxiliaries, ellipsis;

2. Intensifiers (awfully, terribly, terrifically)

3. Emotionally colored words; Dear, sweet, old Charlie, duckie. Wasn’t she beautiful! Dear me! Well! Why! There!

4. Time – fillers (as a matter of fact, in fact, well!, to tell you the truth)

5. Words of the most general character (thing, lot …)

6. Occasional words, neologisms. “ To think that I should have lived to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took’s son!” (A.T.)

7. Slang, jargon. “Oh, but wasn’t T.D. stewed! Say, he was simply ossified! What did Gladys say to him?”

Morphologically: composite verbs: Retire – go away, arrest – run in, betray – let down.

Syntactically: Ellipses, Redundancy, Parenthesis, Tautology, Double negation, Repetition: “You are crazy, you are!” - “I’ll tell you what…’’Don’t you ever say it again! Don’t you mind! “You be careful!”

Phonetically: casual pronunciation: “Watch ma call it? Gimmi cupa tea!”

Syntactically: Imperative constructions (voluntative function); You be careful! Don’t you ever say so again! Don’t you mind!

Postpositional adverbs: Come on, Nervy! Out with it! Claws in, you cat! Off with you and undress! (B.Shaw)

Questions (polite formulae): Will you please (kindly) …? Would you mind closing the door? Subjunctive clauses: (wish + would + Infinitive): I wish you’d behave properly. I want you to behave properly.

COMPRESSION: It’s, isn’t, don’t;

ECONOMY: Been traveling all the winter. – Egypt, Italy and that chuckled America! – I gather! (Galsworthy)

REDUDANCY: Well! I mean, like as if; Don’t give no riddles!

PHATIC and EMOTIVE functions: Intensifiers: do, does, actually, in fact,indeed, really, undoubtedly, seem: You really did go a little too far!

VULGARISMS: on earth, the devil, the hell, lousy: What the hell do you mean?

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