Friedberg_Nila-2021

Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev [The twelve chairs] (pp. 137–42). Moscow: Panorama. Stylistic registers Among the many judgments that native speakers of English can make in word choice, they have intuitions about stylistic registers; they know for instance that the phrase “henceforth the parties agree” is very formal, but “c’mon, guys” is very colloquial. They also know that the former phrase can be used in official (e.g., legal) documents, but not with friends or family, while the latter is unlikely to appear in an academic paper. Understanding this stylistic distinction does not just help us decide what to say and when. It helps us decipher people, offering clues as to who might be a pompous bureaucrat, overusing formal vocabulary in inappropriate situations; who might be a cheerful, formality-eschewing hipster; etc. Knowing about stylistic registers helps us interpret people’s linguistic behavior. The same applies to Russian, and one of the goals of this book is to help students develop stylistic awareness of registers in Russian (see Freels 2007). For example, the utterance «Я люблю Беню Крика, и мне все равно, что он является бандитом» would strike any speaker of Russian as rather bizarre, because this first-person statement, dealing with intimate feelings, uses the formal word является, which is inappropriate for such a context. An appropriate, neutral way to express the same idea would be: «Я люблю Беню Крика, и мне все равно, что он бандит». Thus, one can distinguish between neutral style (нейтральный стиль) , a language that can be safely used in a great variety of situations, from formal style (формальный стиль) , which in this book is used as a catch-all term for official discourse, bureaucratese, or economic, legal, or any other technical discourse. In addition to formal and neutral style, the textbook also makes reference to obsolete ( устаревшее , marked in dictionaries with the abbreviation устар .) and bookish ( книжное , or книж. ) styles, and a variety of informal register types. In general, dictionaries present levels of informality as a scale. For example, on gramota.ru , informal words can be marked as simply colloquial ( разговорное , or разг .), folkish-colloquial ( народно- разговорное , or нар.-разг. ), rude ( грубое or груб ., sometimes referred to as бранное or бран .), jargon ( жаргон , or жарг .) or vulgar ( вульгарное or вульг .); while the latter is to be differentiated from мат (“obscene,” “offensive”), , which is not found in regular dictionaries. Dictionaries also use the label low-style colloquial ( разговорно-сниженное ,