Functional-Stylistic Peculiarities of Modern English Biographical Prose (on the Basis of Five Biographies of Oscar Wilde)
Introduction.
When people speak about style they usually consider texts of verbal art [cf. 14] and it is believed that on the whole only masters of style deserve special investigation and of course masters of style are usually those who are writing artistic texts. But as is absolutely clear any text is characterized by a certain style [4], and it doesn't matter whether it is good or bad because even if the person is writing in a neutral way [17;18] all the same it is the stylistic peculiarity of his text [7]. For this reason it is significant to take a broader view of stylistic investigations and not to confine oneself in one's studies to texts of verbal art only [44]. Functional stylistics is a discipline which creates the foundation for considering the style of all texts, not neсessarily the literary ones [23; 24]. According to functional-stylistic investigations carried out at the English department of the philological faculty of Moscow state university, in any developed literary language there are five basic functional styles: the colloquial one which comes first and which is ontologically the primary one and then the four other styles, such as: journalistic, artistic, scientific and official [35; 36; 37]. These styles of course have some common features, the neutral basis without which they would not be just styles of one literary language but simply separate languages, probably within the broader system [3; 12; 26]. But as they all share the same neutral vocabulary, the same and basic grammatical peculiarities and syntactic characteristics, they of course belong to one language, and should be treated as the realizations of the general system and the sub-systems within the system of the language [9; 11; 42]. But whatever the possible general characteristics of the styles may be, there are some distinct features which are typical of each particular style only [21]. Conversational style is characterized by neutrality and relative
When people speak about style they usually consider texts of verbal art [cf. 14] and it is believed that on the whole only masters of style deserve special investigation and of course masters of style are usually those who are writing artistic texts. But as is absolutely clear any text is characterized by a certain style [4], and it doesn't matter whether it is good or bad because even if the person is writing in a neutral way [17;18] all the same it is the stylistic peculiarity of his text [7]. For this reason it is significant to take a broader view of stylistic investigations and not to confine oneself in one's studies to texts of verbal art only [44]. Functional stylistics is a discipline which creates the foundation for considering the style of all texts, not neсessarily the literary ones [23; 24]. According to functional-stylistic investigations carried out at the English department of the philological faculty of Moscow state university, in any developed literary language there are five basic functional styles: the colloquial one which comes first and which is ontologically the primary one and then the four other styles, such as: journalistic, artistic, scientific and official [35; 36; 37]. These styles of course have some common features, the neutral basis without which they would not be just styles of one literary language but simply separate languages, probably within the broader system [3; 12; 26]. But as they all share the same neutral vocabulary, the same and basic grammatical peculiarities and syntactic characteristics, they of course belong to one language, and should be treated as the realizations of the general system and the sub-systems within the system of the language [9; 11; 42]. But whatever the possible general characteristics of the styles may be, there are some distinct features which are typical of each particular style only [21]. Conversational style is characterized by neutrality and relative