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 1st person PL, the addressee in 2nd 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
Základní údaje
-
Přednáška
Stylistika. -
Semestr
Zimní semestr 2005/06. -
Přednášející
Václav Řeřicha. -
Status
Povinná přednáška pro III. blok.
Literatura
Gal'perin, Il'ja Romanovič. Stylistics. Moskva: Vysšaja škola, 1971.
Knittlová, Dagmar, Ida Rochovanská. Funkční styly v angličtině a češtině. I. díl. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého Olomouc, 1977.