On the varieties of the official functional style of the English language

The subject of the study are sets of linguistic units that convey different types of content. The purpose of the paper is to study the official functional style in connection with its internal heterogeneity. Although functional stylistics has received a detailed description as a philological discipline which concerns itself with the varieties of developed literary languages, the issue of the internal heterogeneity of functional styles still remains unresolved. The novelty of the paper lies in the fact that it shows the heterogeneity of the official functional style. The practical significance of the work is due to identifying the varieties of the official functional style, which is carried out in the paper and which helps to optimize the choice of teaching material depending on the needs and on the general linguistic competence of students. To solve the task, an integrated approach to the study of the material was chosen: the method of linguostylistic and functional-stylistic analysis, the method of continuous sampling, the descriptive-analytical method, as well as the comparative analysis of texts. It has been established that texts belonging to the official functional style can be divided into three groups (prescriptive official texts; descriptive official texts; evaluative official texts) in accordance with the proportions of linguistic components that perform the main functions of language and render a certain type of content.