There must be no doubt that Deltoid addresses Alex in a personal way, while Alex has to address him “sir” (there were only few exceptions when he addressed him “brother”). When using the word “brother”, Alex evidently wants to lower Deltoid’s social status as a “post-corrective adviser”, which is at variance with Deltoid’s efforts who is showing a kind of intimacy or acquaintanceship when calling the boy by his first name: “little Alex, Alex boy”2. In Alex’s speech, higher level of formality mainly appears in the already-discussed ironic constructions: “I appreciate all that, sir, very sincerely”, and “a rather intolerable pain in the head”, or when using similes in a sarcastic way: “as an unmuddied lake”, “clear as an azure sky of deepest summer”. In the rest of the conversation Alex keeps his informal (meaning “not standard”) way of speaking. For instance, he is very informal in a situation such as offering a tea: “a cup of the old chai, sir?”
Mr. Deltoid’s style is different from Alex’s. He is an adult, there is a high probability that he might be also well-educated, therefore his speech tends to be more formal. Deltoid’s sentences are longer, rather sophisticated: “why should you think in terms of there being anything wrong?”, often compound sentences, he uses verb-nominal predications such as: “have no consideration.” What also evokes impersonal style is Deltoid’s vocabulary. The words like: “confession of failure, ambulanced, hospitalized, assorted nastiness, corrective school, or proboscis” are not very likely to appear in everyday conversation.
What brings Deltoid’s formal style down, is his bad habit of using the word “yes” very frequently. Even though the social adviser puts “yes” in almost every third sentence, in order to highlight his statements, the resulting effect is rather a bad impression on the reader. As an example may serve the sentence: “have you been doing something you shouldn’t, yes?”, where Deltoid makes unclear what the vital role of a question is; we are in doubt if he asks a question, or makes a simple statement, or if it is a rhetorical question, or if it is a question to which we already know the answer. Hence, this “yes-habit” degrades Deltoid’s status, and violates his formal style. The fourth characteristics of a text to be discussed is its function. According to Bühler, there exist three main functions of a text: referential, expressive and conative. Referential function names extralinguistic reality.