ДО ПИТАННЯ ПРО СИНТАКСИЧНІ ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ЗАКОНОДАВЧОГО ПІДСТИЛЮ УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ МОВИ

The article states that of the three substyles of the official and business style of the Ukrainian language only the administrative and managerial substyles have been described in detail, while the legislative and diplomatic ones have remained outside the researchers’ interests. It is because of the lack of data regarding the legislative substyle that linguistic dictionaries and textbooks of stylistics wrongly attribute certain structures to the official and business style specific features. A far from unique example is the assertion that the official and business style demonstrates «widespread use of forms of imperative mood», which is not correct since this kind of imperativeness is alien to legislative texts. The purpose of thearticle is to show that it is erroneous to attribute syntactic units not peculiar to one substyle, in particular to the legislative one, to the specific features of the official and business
style. The lack of empirical research on the legislative substyle caused the existence of contradictory statements: in the opinion of some authors, there is a predominance of simple sentences in the official and business style, while according to others, the majority of sentences are composite. However, our analysis shows that in the texts of legislative acts, none of these types is dominant, so
a simple or complex/compound sentence structure can not be considered a specific feature of the official and business style at all.
Our observations do not confirm the statement about the «high frequency of the use of ... sentences with ... participial (diiepryslivnykovyi) constructions». Neither do our data corroborate the «high frequency of use of structures ... with the formants
-но, -то». In the texts studied, the use of sentences with forms ending in -но, -то is 1%, which makes it impossible to consider them as a sign of the legislative The identification of the specific syntactic properties of the legislative substyle presupposes the overcoming of contradictions in views on their distribution and further study of the functioning of syntactic units in all legislative and legal acts.