Administrative Style.

Relations to Other Styles:

- shares many features with the scientific style: clear, unambiguous, well-arranged, succinct

- also shares some features with the publicistic style: the way it addresses the audience

Functions:

- establishes public official intercourse (called ‘officialese’)

- provides information

- records information for future reference

- establishes the relationship binding two parties in an undertaking

- sets the terms and conditions valid for this relationship

- also specific functions of the substyles

Forms:

- mostly written

- letters, records

- forms, questionnaires, application forms

- passports, custom declarations, health certificates

Substyles:

- business style

- the style of legal documents

- the style of military documents

- also the genre of patents, of diplomacy, of directives

General Characteristics:

- traditional, formal, bookish

- stereotypical in terms of both lexicology and syntax

- matter-of-fact, clear, unambiguous, well-arranged, brevet

- impersonal: the speaker in 1^st person PL, the addressee in 2^nd person PL (=> a dialogue in fact)

- objective, polite and inoffensive

- graphical layout

- the form of the document informative in itself

- most important information distinguished by different script type /bold, italics, capitalisation/

- hierarchy: the most important stated first, then the relatively less important

Morphological Features:

- null article in petrified formulas /‘the payment of fees’/

- the determiner ‘such’ without the indefinite article /‘such title of interest’/

Syntactical Features:

- mostly neutral word-order

- mostly declarative sentences

- mostly multiple sentences rather than simple sentences

- frequent co-ordinating conjunction ‘and’

- sentence condensers /participles, infinitives, gerunds/, semi-clausal structures

- impersonal passive constructions

- petrified formulas /‘I devise and bequeath all the residue of my real and personal estate whatsoever and wheresoever…’/

- post-modification: the hierarchy within the phrase expressed more explicitly, often by a preposition /‘the payment by you or by someone on your behalf’/

- sometimes word registers omitting connectors and even verbs

Lexical Features:

- words in their logical primary dictionary meaning

- no words with contextual meaning; no kind of simultaneous realisation of two meanings

- neutral expressions

- no emotional words, no interjections, no phraseology

- no words outside the standard language variety; no dialect, no slang

- euphemisms and ‘politically correct’ expressions

- abstract nouns /‘request, proposal, conditions, authority, advantage, benefit’/

- a restricted group of verbs /‘accept, require, grant, register, specify, perform’/

- formal words and phrases /‘duly; during the term of years herein mentioned; graciously pleased’/

- terms, proper names, numbers

- figures, abbreviations, conventional symbols /‘Gvt, ₤, Ltd’/

- acronyms

- special nomenclature in each substyle = a system of clichés, terms and set expressions