Officiality as an organizing principle of official business communication

The article presents the results of textual activity analysis in the sphere of official written communication - the official principle being one of the guiding organizing principles. The first part of the article substantiates the categorical status of officiality on communicative-speech (as communicative category) and textual (as text category and its variety functional semantic-stylistic category) levels. Intrinsic components of this concept are: 1) realization of regulatory function in the institutional discourse space; 2) expression of social and status relations; 3) legislative and regulatory-methodical support of speech behavior strategy and tactics; 4) availability of various specialized means of expression. The second part of the article describes the category of officiality within the means of expression system, which includes both verbal (split-level linguistic and communicative-speech) and para-verbal units of official functioning of the language used to attach social significance to speech act coming from administrative, public and other authorities as well as from the people vested with official duties and aimed at governing social, working relations and correlated with intra- and extralinguistic norms concerning creation and functioning of an official text. These units acquire terminological designation of an “official functioning of the language unit”. The general definition of category of officiality is given in conclusion of the article: it is an intentionally created category of communication, textual activity, which organizes and regulates the process of communication within social institutions exercising administration of society, production sphere based on the existing system of social-status relations by linguistic and paralinguistic means attaching to the text social significance.