Units of language on different levels are studied by traditional branches of linguistics such as phonetics that deals with speech sounds and intonation; lexicology that treats words, their mean­ing and vocabulary structure, grammar that analyses forms of words and their function in a sentence which is studied by syn­tax. These areas of linguistic study are rather clearly defined and ave a long-term tradition of regarding language phenomena from a leve,-oriented point of view. Thus the subject matter and the material under study of these linguistic disciplines are more or less clear-cut.
It gets more complicated when we talk, about stylistics. Some scholars claim that this is a comparatively new branch of linguistics, which has only a few decades of intense linguistic interest behind it. The term stylistics really came into existence not too long ago. In point of fact the scope of problems and the object of stylistic study go as far back as ancient schools of rhetoric and poetics. The problem that makes the definition of stylistics a curious one deals both with the object and the material of studies. When we speak of the stylistic value of a text we cannot proceed from the level-biased approach that is so logically described through the hierarchical system of sounds, words and clauses. Not only may each of these linguistic units be charged with a certain stylistic meaning but the interaction of these elements, as well as the structure and composition of the whole text are stylistically pertinent. Another problem has to do with a whole set of special linguistic means that create what we call «style». Style may be belles-letters or scientific or neutral or low colloquial or archaic or pompous, or a combination of those. Style may also be typical of a certain writer-Shakespearean style, Dickensian style, etc. There is the style of the j press, the style of official documents, the style of social etiquette and even an individual style of a speaker or writer—his idiolect. Stylistics deals with styles. Different scholars have defined style differently at different times. Out of this variety we shall quote the most representative ones that scan the period from the 50ies to the 90ies of the 20<л century. In 1955 the Academician V.V.Vinogradov defined style as «socially recognized and functionally conditioned internally united totality of the ways of using, selecting and combining the means of lingual ourse in the sphere of one national language or another...» /о 73) In 1971 Prof- J- R- Galperin offered his definition of style s a system of interrelated language means which serves a definite aim in communication.» (36, p. 18). According to Prof. Y. M. Skrebnev, whose book on stylistics was published in 1994, «style is what differentiates a group of homogeneous texts (an individual text) from all other groups (other texts)... Style can be roughly defined as the peculiarity, the set of specific features of a text type or of a specific text.» (47, p. 9). All these definitions point out the systematic and functionally deter­mined character of the notion of style. The authors of handbooks on German (E. Riesel, M. P. Bran-des), French (Y. S. Stepanov, R. G. Piotrovsky, K. A. Dolinin), En­glish (I. R. Galperin, I. V. Arnold, Y. M. Skrebnev, V. A. Maltsev, V. A. Kukharenko, A. N. Morokhovsky and others) and Russian (M. N. Kozhina, I. B. Golub) stylistics published in our country over the recent decades propose more or less analogous systems of styles based on a broad subdivision of all styles into two classes: literary and colloquial and their varieties. These generally include from three to five functional styles. Since functional styles will be further specially discussed in a separate chapter at this stage we shall limit ourselves to only three popular viewpoints in English language style classifications. rof' LR-Galperin distinguishes 5 groups of functional styles for the written variety of language while Prof. I.V.Amold suggests only two ajor types of styles - colloquial and literary bookish — with their «пег division into substyles