Lecture 2.

Stylistic Differentiation of the English Vocabulary

Plan:

1. General considerations. The notions of style.

2. Ilya R. Galperin’s classification of the English word-stock:
1) Neutral vocabulary
2) Literary-bookish vocabulary (poetic words, archaic words, author’s coinage,
terms, neologisms, foreignisms and barabarisms)
3) Non-standard vocabulary (professionalisms, slang, nonce-words, dialectal
words, jargon, vernacular words, vulgarisms)
3. Galina B. Antrushina’ s classification:
1) Formal register (learned words (literary, words of scientific prose,
officialese, poetic diction, archaic and obsolete words, terms),
2) Informal register (colloquial words (literary, familiar, low), slang words,
dialect words).

Terms and definitions:

Functional style is a system of expressive means peculiar to a specific sphere of

communication.

Term is a word or word-group used to name a notion characteristic of some

special field of knowledge.
Poetic words are archaic or very rarely used highly literary words which aim at
producing an elevated effect.
Archaic and historic words are words that drop out of the language or ousted by
words borrowed from other languages.
Barbarisims and foreign words are words that are borrowed from other languages
but preserve their initial (phonetic or graphic) form.

1
Author's coinage is represented by the words or word combinations which were
created by a certain writer or poet or suchlike.
Neologism is any word formed according to the productive structural patterns or
borrowed from another language and felt by the speakers as something new.

Professionalisms are words and expressions used by people belonging to a certain

profession.
Jargon is characterised by its tendency to conceal the meaning of a word from
those uninitiated into “the secrets of the trade”.
Vulgarisms or swear words are coarse words that are not usually used in public.
Vernacular words are characterised by a distorted morphological and phonic
structure.
Slang is represented by some words that are expressive, mostly ironical and serve
to create fresh names for some things that are frequent topics of discourse.
Dialectal words are those which in the process of integration of the English
national language remained beyond its literary boundaries.
Nonce-words are words made for the occasion.