For a better understanding of what book vocabulary is, we recall that in linguistics there are two important concepts - language and speech, which should be distinguished from each other. Language is a system of signs and rules by which these signs are used. It is constant at every time stage and is inherent in any individual. In everyday communication, a person is faced with a specific manifestation and functioning of a given language in the process of communication, that is, with speech.
Speech can be either oral or written. The latter makes especially stringent requirements on a person, because words are the only means of transmitting information on a letter. Unlike the real situation of oral communication, the writer cannot help himself with gestures, facial expressions, intonation, and the reader cannot ask about what he misunderstood. Hence the well-known proverb: "What is written with a pen - that cannot be cut down with an ax." At the same time, for the creation of oral utterances, a person has great opportunities for the choice and suitable organization of
language means.All the words of a language make up its vocabulary. Since people use the language for different purposes (communicating with friends, colleagues and loved ones; creating literary works; writing scientific articles and dissertations; formulating bills and much more), it is clear that the means used for these purposes must be different. The first to pay attention to this was Mikhail Vasilievich Lomonosov. It was he who became a pioneer in the development of the “3 calm theory”, describing them as “high”, “medium” and “low”.
The basis of the language is stylistically neutral vocabulary (home, table, spoon, rag, kind, blue, walk, run, walk, if, etc.). “Low” vocabulary today is called colloquial (electric train, stupid, have a bite, oh, yeah) and “colloquial” (moron, squander, foul and others up to profanity).
Book vocabulary - these are the words that Lomonosov attributed to the "high calm." Modern linguists along with colloquial style distinguish 4 basic book styles: journalistic, official business, scientific and fiction styles. All of them are characterized by the use, along with neutral, stylistically colored vocabulary.
- Book vocabulary of a journalistic style (special terminology: chronicle, correspondent, format, news portal, news agency, opposition, genocide, denominations; assessment vocabulary: avant-garde, anti-colonial, high-class, fail).
- The vocabulary of an official business style (clericalism: subscriber, client, bank account, due, applicant, cassation; service words: due to fault, regarding, because; terminology - widely used and highly specialized: attaché, ratification, protocol, charge).
- Scientific-style book vocabulary (terms of different types: differentiation, argument, alkali, interference, square root, phonology; abstract and general book vocabulary: vibration, comparison, arrangement; abbreviations: VNIIGMI, CAD; symbols: CuS, PbO; "production" words: adjustment, grinding, rolling).
- High vocabulary of the artistic style (poetry: bowels, flame, ragweed, lavish, bed, heed; archaisms and historicisms: brow, lanits, hand, see, spoken; folk poetry: ruff, grief, mate friend, lazy).
Book vocabulary, examples of which are given above, can also be used in oral utterances, but in this case, the interlocutors are aware of such words and expressions as foreign, used for a specific purpose, for example, comic (“Read this manuscript!”, “Dismiss!”, “ What an apartheid! ”,“ Well, dear friend! ”).