摘要
维多利亚时代,华丽藻饰的文风盛行一时.许多作家讲究文章气势,追求高雅堂皇的文风,有些人甚至说话的时候也带着演说家的腔调.维多利亚女王(Queen Victoria)
In this century, especially since the Second World War, the most obvious trend of English prose writing has been towards much greater informality of expression. At all levels-from the novel to the advertisement, writing has broken away from Victorian models and moved closer to ordinary speech. This paper deals with the expression, the influence, the obstacle, and the future of this trend.
The trend appears in many aspects, the acceptance of colloquial forms, the use of verbless sentences, the loosening of syntactic structures, the shortening of sentence length, the adoption of an informal tone and the change of style from pompous to plain. This tendency has affected nearly all types of writing, such as commercialese, officialese and legal documents. Although there has been a backwash from obscure or pretentious writing by specialists, the trend towards informality is irresistibly increasing. English prose of the future is sure to be close to standard spoken English.
出处
《外语学刊》
1987年第1期51-58,共8页
Foreign Language Research
