Abstract The present study aims to contribute to the existing body of knowledge on style-forming factors in Czech and Slovak functional stylistics, with a particular focus on their configuration in texts. The authors propose that style-forming factors should be defined as elements that: Firstly, they are derived from the communicative situation and its components. Secondly, they are associated with a set of expressive means in the minds of community members. Thirdly, they influence both the production and reception of the text. In the context of subjective style formation, authors have distinguished between individual and group factors, the latter encompassing factors such as the author’s affiliation to a social group, particularly one characterised by age or gender. The present authors posit that functional styles emerge from a configuration of style-forming factors that reflect the individual components of a communicative situation that is considered typical for a given functional style. The relationship between these components and text style is indirect, with the norms of functional styles and their age- and gender-related varieties serving as mediators. This theoretical framework facilitates a more comprehensive analysis of the interplay between style-forming factors, functional style, and style norms. It also enables the study of the transformation of functional style norms, thereby integrating stylistics with variational and interactional sociolinguistics.
Mrázková et al. (Mon,) studied this question.