Substyles

- the style of exact science: more impersonal

- the style of humanities: closer to the publicistic style, also shares features with the literary style

General Characteristics

- matter-of-fact, clear, explicit; unambiguous, precise; concise, brevet

- stereotypical in terms of both lexicology and syntax

- impersonal, objective, suppresses the personality of the author

- logical hierarchy within the text: introduction, argument, conclusion and résumé

- quotations and references to other texts

- highly nominal character

- diagrams, charts, sketches, illustrations

Morphological Features

- present tense: timeless validity of the proposition

Syntactical Features

- neutral word-order, no marked word-order

- mostly declarative sentences

- sentence condensers /participles, infinitives, gerunds/ and semi-clausal structures

- no ellipsis, no omission of ‘that’ and ‘which’ in relative clauses

- impersonal passive constructions /‘it should be pointed out that…; it has been found out that…; it has previously been shown that…’/

- active construction with the authorial pronoun ‘we’ /‘we deduce, observe, define, obtain, assume, note’/

Causative constructions

- ‘make/render N ADJ’ /‘this makes the problem easy; this renders the metal hard’/

- ‘enable, allow, permit, cause, make INF’ /‘safety valves allow the metal to cool slowly’/

Theme /topic/ >rheme /focus/

- ‘there’ constructions /‘there is, seems, appears, stands, lives, lies’/

- clefts for any constituents but verbal ones /‘it is … that’/

- pseudoclefts for verbal constituents /‘what is…’/

- rheme marked by indefinite article or null article with plural, abstracts, uncountable nouns

- theme marked by definite article, pronouns, anaphoric reference by ‘such, similar, one – the other’