Lecture 2. By their very naturecabarets tend to be a bit of a hit and missaffair

By their very naturecabarets tend to be a bit of a hit and missaffair. And Manchester's own 'Downtown Cabaret' is ample proofof that. When it was good it was very good, and when it was bad it wasawful. Holding this curate's eggtogether was John Beswick acting as compere and keeping the hotchpotch of sketches and songs running along smoothly.And his professionalism shone throughas he kept his hand on the tillerand steered the shown througha difficult audi­ence with his own brandof witticism. Local playwright Alan Chivers had previously worked like a Trojanand managed to marshal the talents of a bevy ofManchester's rising stars.

Syntax of the newspaper style as well as syntax of any other bookish style is a diversity of all structural types of sentences (simple, complex, compound and mixed) with a developed system of clauses connected with each other by all types of syntactic connections. The coating of bookishness is creat­ed by multicomponent attributive noun groups, participial, infinitive and gerundial word-combinations and syntactic constructions of secondary predication.

Advertising newspaper materials (ads) may be classified and non-clas­sified. Classified ads are arranged topicwise in certain rubrics: "Births", "Deaths", "Marriages", "Sale", "Purchase", "Здоровье", "Меняю", "Cнимy", "Услуги", "Знакомства", etc. Non-classified ads integrate all top­ics. Ads are arranged according to stereotyped rules of economizing on space. Due to this all non-informative speech segments are omitted intentionally, e. g.: Births. On November 1, at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, to Barbara and John Culhane - a son. Здоровьe. Aнтицеллулитный массаж. Пp. Ильичa, 7a. T. 345-44-65.

Graphically, the newspaper style is notable for the system of head­lines. The headlines have formed themselves into a specific genre. They com­bine three functions: gripping readers' attention, providing information and evaluating the contents of the article. To perform these functions newspaper headlines must be sensational, expressive and informative. Sentences in head­lines tend to be short, one-member or elliptical, affirmative, negative, inter­rogative and exclamatory.

Thepublicistic style. This style falls into the following variants: the ora­tory style (speeches, lectures and reports), the style of radio and TV pro­grams, the style of essays and journalistic articles. The most essential feature of the oratory style is the direct contact of the speaker with the audience. To establish and maintain this contact, the speaker continuously resorts to vari­ous language means of address: ladies and gentlemen, honourable guests, dear colleagues, dear friends, etc. Public speeches, radio and TV com­mentaries are crammed with syntactic stylistic devises of repetitions (direct, synonymic, anaphoric, epiphoric, framing, linking), polysyndeton, and parallel­isms. These devices aim at making information persuasive. Journalistic arti­cles and essays deal with political, social, economic, moral, ethical, philosoph­ical, religious, educational, cultural and popular-scientific problems. The choice of language means depends on the subject described. Scientific articles and essays contain more neutral words and constructions and less expressive means than articles and essays on humanitarian problems.

The belletristic style. This style attracts linguists most of all because the authors of books use the whole gamma of expressive means and stylistic devises while creating their images. The function of this style is cognitiveaesthetic. The belletristic style embraces prose, drama and poetry. The language of emotive prose is extremely diverse. Most of the books contain the authors' speech and the speech of protagonists. The authors' speech embod­ies all stylistic embellishments which the system of language tolerates. The speech of protagonists is just the reflection of people's natural communica­tion which they carry out by means of the colloquial style. The language of drama is also a stylization of the colloquial style when colloquial speech is not only an instrument for rendering information but an effective tool for the description of personages. The most distinctive feature of the language of poetry is its elevation. The imagery of poems and verses is profound, implicit and very touching. It is created by elevated words (highly literary, poetic, barbaric, obsolete or obsolescent), fresh and original tropes, inversions, repetitions and parallel constructions. The pragmatic effect of poetic works may be enhanced by perfected rhymes, metres, rhymes and stanzas.

The colloquial styles. These styles comply with the regularities and norms of oral communication. The vocabulary of the literary colloquial style comprises neutral, bookish and literary words, though exotic words and colloquialisms are no exception. It is devoid of vulgar, slangy and dialectal lexical units. Reduction of grammatical forms makes the style morphologically distinguished, putting it in line with other colloquial styles. Sentences of literary colloquial conversation tend to be short and elliptical, with clauses connected asyndetically.

The vocabulary of the informal colloquial style is unofficial. Besides neutral words, it contains lots of words with connotative meanings. Expresslveness of informal communication is also enhanced by extensive use of stylistic devises. The speaker chooses between the literary or informal collo­quial style taking into account the following situational conditions: aim of com­munication, place of communication, presence or absence of strangers, per­sonal relations, age factor, sex factor, etc.

One of the variants of the informal colloquial style is the dialect. Dialects are regional varieties of speech which relate to a geographical area. Theterm dialect used to refer to deviations from Standard English which were used by groups of speakers. Political awareness has now given linguists the current concept of a dialect as any developed speech system. Standard English itself is therefore now considered to be a dialect of English – equal in status with regional dialects such as Scottish or social dialects, or Black English. The concept of dialect embraces all aspects of a language from grammar to vocabulary. Nowadays linguists take a descriptive view of all language phenomena. They do not promote the notion of the superiority of Stan­dard English. This is not to say that Standard English and Received Pronunci­ation are considered equal to dialectal forms, but certainly attitudes are be­coming more liberal.

Writers have for centuries attempted to represent dialectal utterances in their work. Shakespeare often gave his yokels such items. Snout the tinker in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" says "By'r lakin, a parlous fear". The novelist D. H. Lawrence represented the Nottinghamshire dialect in many of his novels by interspersing Standard English with utterances such as "Come into th'ut" spoken by Mellors in "Lady Chatterley's Lover". Some contempo­rary regional dialect forms are ones which have remained as such after being eliminated from what is now Standard English. An example of this is the Scottish kirtle which was replaced in Standard English during the Old English period by skirt.

The lowest level in the hierarchy of colloquial styles is occupied by sub­standard or special colloquial English. At the first glance, substandard English is a chaotic mixture of non-grammatical or contaminated speech pat­terns and vulgar words which should be criticized without regret. However, a detailed analysis of these irregularities shows that they are elements of a system, which is not deprived of rationality. For example, the universal gram­matical form ain't is a simplified substitute for am (is, are) not, was (were) not, have (has, had) not, shall (will) not, there is (are, was, were) not:

"I ain't sharin' no time. I ain't takin' nobody with me, neither" (J. Steinbeck).

"It ain't got no regular name" (E. Caldwell).

"All I say ain't no buildings like that on no Florida Keys" (E. Hemingway).

Economical means of substandard English coexist with redundant or ple­onastic forms and contaminated syntactic structures:

"Then let's us have us a drink" (T. Capote).

"I think it more better if you go to her, sir" (S. Maugham).

"I wants my wife. I need s her at home" (W. Faulkner).

"Dey was two white mens I heerd about" (W. Styron).

"Young folks and womens. they aint cluttered" (W. Faulkner).

"I want you guys should listen to Doc, here" (J. Steinbeck).

"I used to could play the fiddle" (T. Capote).

Substandard English speech abounds in obscene words marked in dictio­naries by the symbol "taboo", vulgarisms (bloody buggering hell, damned home-wrecking dancing devil), slangy words (busthead = inferior or cheap whisky, liquor, or wine which results in hangover; cabbage = money, banknotes, paper money; frog-eater = a Frenchman; a pin-up girl = a sexually attractive young woman, usually a movie celebrity, a model or the like) and specific cliches (dead and gone, good and well, lord and master, far and away, this here...).

Substandard English is used by millions of people in English speaking countries. It is a conspicuous indicator of low language culture and educational level. Being introduced into books, it becomes a picturesque means of protagonists' characterization. Russian and Ukrainian substandard languages have the same features. Compare: грéнки, феномéн, беспреце н дентный, более моложе, мы хочем, я пóняла, мы живем на 245 квáртале, белые розы: что с ними сделал снег и мороз ы, библиотека для детей централизованной системы, подъезжая к станции, с меня слетела шляпа. It is not an easy thing for a translator to provide sufficient equiva­lenсe of translation in case with substandard languages. He must be a great expert on both the source and target language substandard resources.

The binary division of functional styles into bookish and colloquial is gener­ally accepted in the soviet and post-soviet stylistic school. In British stylistic theories we also meet two general terms which cover the whole set of partic­ular functional styles: Standard English and Substandard English. Standard English embraces all bookish substyles and the literary colloquial style. Substan­dard English includes the informal colloquial style and special colloquial English. The term Standard English, as viewed by the British scholars, refers to a dialect which has acquired the status of representing the English language.

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