The notion of style in the language. Notion of language expressive means and stylistic devices. Convergence of stylistic devices.

The notion of functional style.

One and the same thought may be worded in more than one way. This diversity is predetermined by coexist-ence ofseparate language subsystems, elements of which stand in relations of interstyle synonymy. Compare:

I am afraid lest John should have lost his wayin the forest (bookish) = I fear John's got lost in the wood (conversational)

. Such language subsystems are called " functional styles". Functional styleunits are capable of transmitting some additional informa-tion about the speaker and the objective reality in which communication takes place, namely the cultural and educational level of the speaker, his inner state of mind, intentions, emotions and feelings, etc. The most traditionallyaccepted functional styles are the style of official and business communication, the style of scientific prose, the newspaper style, the publicistic style, the belletristic style, the conversational style. The style a writer or speaker adopts depends partly on his own person-ality but very largely on what hehas to say and what his purposes are. It follows that style and subject matter should match each other appropriately. Just how important it is tochoose an appropriate style can be seen by examining the following three sentences, which all say the same thing but in different ways:

John's dear parent is going to his heavenly home (bookish). John's father is dying (literary colloquial). John's old fella's on his way out (informal colloquial).

Though these sentences say the same thing, the style is very different in each.

The notion of expressive means.

Expressive means of a language are those phonetic, lexical, morphological and syntactic units and forms whichmake speech emphatic. Expressive means introduce connotational (stylistic, non-denotative) meanings into utterances.

The notion of stylistic devices.

Stylistic devices (tropes, figures of speech) unlike expressive means are not language phenomena. They areformed in speech and most of them do not exist out of context. According to principles of their formation, stylistic devices are grouped into phonetic, lexico-semantic and syntactic types. Basically, all stylistic devices are the result of revaluation of neutral words, word-combinations and syntacticstructures. Revaluation makes language units obtain connotations and stylistic value. A stylistic device is the subject matter of stylistic semasiology