3.2 Scientific Prose Style in the Slovak Language

Scientific prose has risen and has developed altogether with development of science and scientific thinking. And even it has started to develop in the times of the forming of reputable Slovak; it started to form into today`s version only in 20th century, mainly after the World War II. In connection to intense development of scientific research and with development of the scientific institutions. In the hierarchy of the styles of the public intercourse the scientific prose style stands at the top and between the styles of the reputable language it is considered to be well marked. Utterance of this style is relatively uniformed. Their stylistic image is set mainly by lexical and syntactic means.

During the eightees, in scientific research about styles in the field of Slovak culture were alternating two different terms: educational and scientific style. J. Mistrík in his works prefers the term educational style because he considers administrative, publicistic and rhetorical styles as scientific styles. Under the term educational style it is understood that scientific style, where are explanatory and descriptive processes with intention to teach, explain or professionally inform, used in. The stylistics of Western-European culture field often recognize scientific style according to whether there are the humanities or exact sciences. According this, the style of the humanities is more or less closer to the publicistic, aesthetic or essayistic style. Style of exact sciences remains scientific. In accordance with traditional understanding it intermediates informations of scientific researches. Thus, there are produced texts in a base of indicated pre-preparation, the level of their spontaneity is substantively lower in comparison with aesthetic texts.

Utterance of scientific prose style is used where it is needed to communicate about scientific knowledge. Since main aim of the intercourse in this field is to give professional information, the special education and special qualification of the author of this utterance is needed. The basic characters of the scientific prose style are conditional by this too – literarity, monologicity, publicity, notionality, exactness, explicitness and expertness. Scientific utterance is held in the public, usually are written, that`s why contents of communication have to be express by linguistic means. It has to be formulated explicitly and clearly in the linguistic and stylistic point of view. With monologicity there is a connection with monotematicity. As for the content it is usually quite difficult, it enters into details and argumentates with illustrations.

The characteristic feature of lexes of the scientific prose style texts is using notional means, which serve to the real exactness and the sophisticated character of the utterance. For the sake of unicity and objectivity, the scientific prose style is resigning emotional and expressive means, what goes at the expense of variability and plasticity of an expression.
The stylistics of scientific text is mainly set by the lexical means. Professional terminology responds to the aim to express an idea the most precisely and the most clearly. Professional terminology – domestic and international – is in the lexical plan the most significant mark of the scientific prose style. Terminology is then a mean of notionality, exactness and professionality of an expression. To serve its aim well, it is free of emotional and evaluating colour.
The choice and exploitation of the syntactical means is also in the tight connection with characteristic attributes of the scientific prose style. They help mainly literality, monologocity, explicitness and precision of the text. The precisely constructed subject-verb sentence is the most suitable for the need of scientific prose style, while there is a statement the most frequent type. Presence of other modal sentence is rather odd. While a receiver is usually not present, an utterance as a whole has to be integrated in thoughts and formally completed. Expressing verbal element dominates, and that`s why individual sentences has to be logic and syntactically strict in order to signalise semantic relations more clearly and more obviously. This need is actual mainly when scientific prose style is used to express linguistically difficult thoughts. And just with an effort clearly and precisely express a logical relations joined on one sight, with preffering a complex sentences and on the other sight preferring of the hypo syntax. Scientific prose style does not use an expressive syntactic construction. There is only possibility of contextual ellipses or parenthesis.