8. The Style of official documents. Its Criteria and Linguistic peculiarities.

There is one more style of language within the field of standard lit­erary English which has become singled out, and that is the s ty le of official d о с и т е п t s, or "officialese", as it is sometimes called. As has already been pointed out, this FS is not homogeneous and is represented by the following substyles or variants:

1) the language of business documents,

2) the language of legal documents,

3) that of diplomacy,

4) that of military documents.

The main aim of this type of.communication is to state the conditions binding two parties in an undertaking. These parties may be: the state and the citizen, or citizen and citizen; a society and its members (statute or ordinance); two or more enterprises or bodies (busi­ness correspondence or contracts); two or more governments (pacts, trea­ties); a person in authority and a subordinate (orders, regulations, ins­tructions, authoritative directives); a board or presidium and an assemb­ly or general meeting (procedures acts, minutes), etc.

The aim of communication in this style of language is to reach agree­ment between two contracting parties. Even protest against violations of statutes, contracts, regulations, etc., can also be regarded as a form by which normal cooperation is sought on the basis of previously at­tained concordance.

This most general function of the style of official documents predeter­mines the peculiarities of the style. The most striking, though not the most essential feature, is a special system of cliches, terms and set ex­pressions by which each substyle can easily be recognized, for example: / beg to inform you, I beg to move, I second the motion, provisional agenda, the above-mentioned, hereinafter named, on behalf of, private advisory, Dear Sir, We remain, your obedient servants.

Thus in finance we find terms like extra revenue, taxable capacities, liability to profit tax. Terms and phrases like high contracting parties, to ratify an agreement, memorandum, pact, Charge d'affaires, protectorate, extra-territorial status, plenipotentiary will immediately brand the utterance as diplomatic. In legal language, examples are: to deal with a case; summary procedure; a body of judges; as laid down in.

Likewise, other varieties of official language have their special no- ' menclature, which is conspicuous in the text and therefore easily discern­ible as belonging to the official language style.

Besides the special nomenclature characteristic of each, variety of he style, there is a feature common to all these Varieties—the use of abbreviations, conventional symbols and contractions, for example:

M. P. (Member of Parliament), Gvt (gwernmen/), H.M.S. (His Majesty's Steamship), $ (dollar), Ј (pound), Ltd (Limited).

Abbreviations are particularly abundant in military documents. Here they are used not only as conventional symbols but as signs of the military code, which is supposed to be known only to the initiated. Exam­ples are:

D.A.O, (Divisional ЛгшпипШоп Officer); adv. (advance); atk (attack); obj. (object); A/T (anti-tank); ATAS (Air Transport Auxiliary Service),

Another feature of the style is. the use of words in their logical dic­tionary meaning. Just as in the other matter-of-fact styles, and in contrast intrinsically to the belles-lettres style, there is no room for contextual meanings or for any kind of simultaneous realization of two meanings. In military documents sometimes metaphorical names are given to mountains, rivers, hills or villages, but these metaphors are perceived as code signs and have no aesthetic value.

Words with emotive meaning are not to be found in the style of official documents either. Even in the style of scientific prose some words may be found which reveal the attitude of the writer, his individual evalua­tion of the facts and events of the issue. But no such words are to be found in official style, except those which are used in business letters as conventional phrases of greeting or close, as Dear Sir, yours faithfully.

As in all other functional styles, the distinctive properties appear as a system. We cannot single out a style by its vocabulary only, recog­nizable though it always is. The syntactical pattern of the style is as significant as the vocabulary, though not perhaps so immediately apparent.

Perhaps the most noticeable of all syntactical features are the com­positional patterns of the variants of this style. Thus, business letters have a definite compositional pattern, namely, the heading giving the address of the writer*, the date, the name of the addressee and his address.

Almost every official document has its own compositional design. Pacts and statutes, orders and minutes, notes and memoranda—all have more or less definite forms, and it will not be an exaggeration to state that the form of the document is itself informative, inasmuch as it tells something about the matter dealt with (a letter, an agreement, an order, etc).

As is seen from the different samples above, the overall code of the official style falls into a system of subcodes, each characterized by its own terminological nomenclature, its own compositional form, its own variety of syntactical arrangements. But the integrating fea­tures of all these subcodes, emanating from the general aim of agreement between- parties, remain the following:

1) conventionality of expression;

2) absence of any emotiveness;

3) the encoded character of language symbols (including abbre­viations) and

4) a general syntactical mode of combining several pronouncements into one sentence: ^