MORPHOLOGICAL FEATURES OF ATTRIBUTES IN TWO-COMPONENT CONSTRUCTIONS IN THE OFFICIAL DISCOURSE TEXTS AS A STYLISTIC MARKER

Abstract

The article considers the attributes that are a part of two-component constructions that function in the texts of official discourse with the goal to present a word-formation typology (word formation with the help of suffixes) realized in such attributes as a possible stylistic marker of official discourse. As a material the text corpora that belong to the genres of official discourse have been taken. For completeness and reliability of the description the authors decided to analyze four different genres referred to official discourse – official correspondence (taken from the correspondence of the British Council with teachers of universities in foreign countries (British Council Correspondence), judicial procedural documents (texts by the judicial documents of the Administrative Tribunal of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in the collection “Judges of the Administrative Tribunal of the International Labor Organization”), the texts based on the instructions for vehicles maintenance (texts of operating instruction for Toyota vehicles) and formula of inventions (patents) (the texts containing formulas of inventions in physics and radio electronics, extracted from the licensed sources). The total size is 200 thousand tokens, texts of each genre included samples of 50 thousand tokens. The comparative analysis between both types of genres – “humanitarian” and “technical” – demonstrates that: firstly, in both types of genres there is some general regularity, and it concerns first of all non-affix attributes which in all genres without exception have a higher frequency of usage than the affix ones; secondly, among the most frequent suffixes used in the attributes the common ones can be distinguished: -tion, -ty. But this is where the general characteristics of suffix attributes end. Therefore according to the results of the performed statistical analysis the conclusion can be made that derivational units of attributes expressed by suffix units including in two-component constructions in the genres of official style cannot be used as a stylistic marker of official discourse with a high degree of probability.