This text reports on an up-to-date approach to style presented in a new handbook of Czech stylistics (Hoffmannová, Homoláč, Chvalovská, Jílková, Kaderka, Mareš & Mrázková 2016). It describes the handbook’s sound and inspiring take on language and the situations, styles, texts and genres of contemporary communication (uncommonly based on the notion of communicative sphere rather than on the traditional concept of functional style). It evaluates the new perspectives on the description, analysis and interpretation of style in seven selected communicative spheres: everyday communication (both spoken and written), administrative communication, expert communication, school communication, media communication (both spoken and written), advertising communication, and literary communication. The text acknowledges how the employment of the ‘communicative sphere’ notion, together with a predominant focus on orality, shifts the Czech view of style from the traditional functional stylistics approach to the “new” stylistics accenting dialogue, interaction, colloquiality and intertextuality.
The aim of the article is to propose a suitable system of usage classifications for a Czech monolingual dictionary in preparation. We presuppose that the labeling of linguistic items should reflect the situation of their typical usage rather than their association with a structural variety of Czech (e.g. Standard Czech, dialects or Common Czech). The proposed system is based on our understanding of the Czech language situation as consisting of two basic communicative domains (or sets of communicative situations): (1) everyday communication and (2) the realization of higher communicative aims. Other criteria of distinction applied within both domains are: the spoken or oral form of the utterance, typically Bohemian or Moravian use, the position of the linguistic item on the axis of high, medium and low style, expressiveness of the linguistic item, its position on the temporal axis (archaic, historical, new…), and its affiliation with a social sphere (subject field). The combination of these criteria yields many categories, some of which are empty, irrelevant or marginal to the classification of lexical items. In reducing these categories to those relevant for lexicographic description, we propose and define eleven basic labels and eight two-part label combinations (though other, multi-part combinations are also possible).
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