1. The subject of stylistics. Its connection with other disciplines.

Stylistics - branch of general linguistics. It has mainly with two tasks: St-s – is regarded as a lang-ge science which deals with the results of the act of communication. There are 2 basic objects of st-s: - stylistic devices and figures of speech; - functional styles. Branches of st-s: - Lexical st-s – studies functions of direct and figurative meanings, also the way contextual meaning of a word is realized in the text. L.S. deals with various types of connotations – expressive, evaluative, emotive; neologisms, dialectal words and their behavior in the text. - Grammatical st-s – is subdivided into morphological and syntactical. Morph-l s. views stylistic potential of gram-l categories of dif-t parts of speech. Potential of the number, pronouns…- Syntactical s. studies syntactic, expressive means, word order and word combinations, dif-t types of sentences and types of syntactic connections. Also deals with origin of the text, its division on the paragraphs, dialogs, direct and indirect speech, the connection of the sentences, types of sentences. - Phonostylistics – phonetical organization of prose and poetic texts. Here are included rhythm, rhythmical structure, rhyme, alliteration, assonance and correlation of the sound form and meaning. Also studies deviation in normative pronunciation. - Functional S (s. of decoding) – deals with all subdivisions of the language and its possible use (newspaper, colloquial style). Its object - correlation of the message and communicative situation.

2.Functional Styles of the English Language

According to Galperin: Functional Style is a system of interrelated language means serving a definite aim in communication. It is the coordination of the language means and stylistic devices which shapes the distinctive features of each style and not the language means or stylistic devices themselves. Each style, however, can be recoquized by one or more leading features which are especially conspicuous. For instance the use of special terminology is a lexical characteristics of the style of scientific prose, and one by which it can easily be recognized. Classification of Functional Styles of the English Language

1. The Belles - Lettres Functional Style.

3. The Newspaper Functional Style.

a) brief news items;

b) advertisments and announcements;

c) headlines;

4. The Scientific Prose Style.

a) exact sciences;

b) humanitarian sciences;

c) popular- science prose;

a) poetry;

b) emotive prose;

c) drama;

2. Publicistic Functional Style,

a) oratory;

b) essays;

c) articles in newspapers and magazines;

5. The Official Documents Functional Style.

a) diplomatic documents;

b) business letters;

c) military documents;

d) legal documents;

3.The Literary and Nonliterary Language.

The literary language constantly enriches its vocabulary and forms from the non-literary (vernacular, colloquial). It also adopts some of its syntactical peculiarities and by doing so gives them the status of norms of the literary language. The norm of usage is established by the language community at every given period in the development of the language.

Thus literary language is a historical category. I.R. Galperin defines the literary language as "that elaborated form (variety) of the national language which obeys definite morphological, phonetic, syntactical, lexical, phraseological, and stylistic norms recognized as standard and therefore acceptable in all kinds and types of discourse. It allows modifications but within the framework of the system of established norms."

The literary language greatly influences the non-literary language. Many words, constructions and particularly phonetic improvements have been introduced through it into the English colloquial language. The English literary language was particularly regulated and formalized during the XVII and XVIII centuries. The influence over the non-literary language had its greatest effect in the XIX century with the spread of general education, in the XX century with the introduction of radio and TV.

It is difficult to specify the characteristic features of the non-literary variety because it does not present any system. Thus the best way to understand it is to contrast the non-literary form to the existing form of the literary English. The publication of dictionaries does much to establish the literary language norms, but at the very moment the norm is established it begins to fluctuate. Sometimes we may say that two norms co-exist, but one of them will give way to its rival and either vanish from the language completely or remain on its outskirts. This is particularly the case with pronunciation norms.