According to such functional stylistic features as social preserves, content and the prevailing function Lithuanian essays can be ascribed to three variations: publicistic, scientific and literary style. The major part of essays is dominated by the features of expressive and analytical sub-style of the publicistic style. Essays are also written in the field of liberal arts and natural sciences. In the analysed period the Lithuanian essay surpassed the dividing line between the publicistic and creative literature – texts of fictional content may be called essays. / Pagal tokius funkcinius stilistinius požymius kaip visuomenės veiklos sritis, turinys ir vyraujanti funkcija lietuvių esė galima priskirti trims atmainoms: publicistiniam, moksliniam ir meniniam stiliui. Didžiojoje jų dalyje vyrauja publicistinio stiliaus ekspresyviojo bei analitinio postilio požymiai. Rašoma esė ir humanitarinių bei gamtos mokslų srityje Tiriamuoju laikotarpiu lietuvių esė peržengė ribą, skiriančią publicistiką ir meninę literatūrą – esė pavadinami fikcinio turinio tekstai.

In the system of functional styles, the publicistic style occupies an intermediate position between subject-specific styles and the belles-lettres style. Presently, it is possible to speak about a separate publicistic style, since its varieties have been fully formed. It has been observed that the issue of analysing publicistic-style varieties is very topical and results from the growing popularity of this style. The typology of the publicistic style has not been widely investigated in works on Lithuanian language stylistics. This style is not divided into clear-cut varieties: more emphasis is placed on its genre differentiation. On the basis of linguistic and non-linguistic factors, the following varieties of the publicistic style (sub-styles) may be distinguished: informational, analytical and the sub-style of expressive information (artistic publicistics). So far, the place of artistic publicistics between the publicistic and other functional styles has not been defined; therefore, description of texts of this sub-style poses problems. The publicistic style is defined by the linguistic characteristics of different levels of language: the length of the sentence, the frequency of different parts of speech in a sentence, etc. The syntactical and morphological structure of this style is also influenced by non-linguistic attributes: the addressant, the addressee, the content of texts, functions of the act of speech, etc. The average length of sentences in publicistic-style... [to full text]