Discourse and Functional Style: the Problem of the Correlation

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of the correlation of the categories of discourse and functional style in modern specialists` interpretations. Attention to this problem is caused, on the one hand, by the growing popularity of the discursive analysis and the very term discourse, and, on the other hand, by the fact, that functional style remains one of the important categories in Eastern Europe linguistics. The key theories of discourse and functional style; the common features of discourse and functional style; the criteria for their separation have been singled out. The concepts of M. Foucault’s discourse, French and German-Austrian discourse analysis, schools of N. Arutyunova, T. van Dijk, as well as the understanding of the style of V. V. Vinogradov and M. N. Kozhina have been involved for the theoretical comparison of the above-mentioned categories. According to modern researchers, discourse and functional style relate to the neighbouring linguistic disciplines and have common features. One of them is extralinguistic factor, which directly determine the specificity of discourse and functional style. At the same time, researchers put borders for discourse and functional style, recognizing the complexity of the problem of their separation. The differentiation of the categories is carried out by means of the ontological criterion: the discourse is interpreted via the concept of “discursive formation”, while style is interpreted via “the form of public consciousness”. Accordingly, scholars come to the conclusion about the diversity of structure and nature of the discourse and functional style. The importance of each concept is stated and the neccessity of their joint application for a deeper linguistic analysis of the text is emphasized. The correlation of the discourse and functional style is also considered on the basis of the textocentric model of discourse. The thesis about a certain hierarchical subordination of the methods of stylistics and discourse-analysis is argued. It is said about the “embedding” of the stylistics into the subject of discourse analysis, which promotes interdisciplinary enrichment: in this case, the discourse analysis acquires the proper “linguostylistic” content, and stylistics is realized in the frames of functional parameters of the discourse.