The Technical Assistance Committee,

RECALLING THAT according to Economic and Social Council resolution 542 (XVIII) the preparation and review of the Expanded Programme and all other necessary steps should be carried out in a way that TAC ought to be in a position to approve the over-all programme and authorize allocation to participating organizations by 30 November at the latest,

CONSIDERING THAT a realistic programme such as the Expanded Programme cannot be planned and formulated without prior knowledge of the financial resources available for its implementation,

CONSIDERING THAT TAC, with the assistance of such ad hoc subcommittees as it may find necessary to establish, will normally need about one week to carry out the task referred to in the resolution mentioned above, bearing in mind the necessary consultations with the representatives of the participating organizations,

1. ASKS the Secretary-General to seek to arrange each year that the Pledging Conference should be convened as early as possible taking due account of all factors involved;

2. DECIDES that the Secretary-General should in future work on the assumption that in carrying out the functions of approving the programme and authorizing allocations as required by Economic and Social Council resolution 542 (XVIII), the TAC will usually need to meet for oneweek;

3. REQUESTS further the Secretary-General to transmit this resolution to all States Members and non-members of the United Nations which participate in the Expanded Programme."

In no other style of language will such an arrangement of utterance be found. In fact, the whole document is one sentence from the point ofview of its formal syntactical structure. The subject of the sentence 'The Technical Assistance Committee' is followed by a number of participial constructions – 'Recalling' –, 'Considering' –, 'Considering' –, is cut off by a comma from them and from the homogeneous predicates – 'Asks', 'Decides', 'Requests'. Every predicate structure is numbered and begins with a capital letter just as the participial constructions.

This structurally illogical way of combining different ideas has its sense. In the text just quoted the reason for such a structural pattern probably lies in the intention to show the equality of the items and similar dependence of the participial constructions on the predicate constructions.

"In legal English," writes H. Whitehall, "...a significant judgement may depend on the exact relations between words....The language of the law is written not so much to be understood as not to be misunderstood."[5]

As is seen from the different samples above, the over-all code of the official style falls into a system of subcodes, each characterized by its own terminological nomenclature, its own compositional form, its own variety of syntactical arrangements. But the integrating features of all these subcodes, emanating from the general aim of agreement between parties, remain the following:

1) conventionality of expression;

2) absence of any emotiveness;

3) the encoded character of language symbols (including abbreviations) and

4) a general syntactical mode of combining several pronouncements into one sentence.

[1] New York Times. London Literary Letter.

[2] Hill, Archibald G. Some Points in the Analysis of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in Essays in Literary Analysis. Austin, Texas, 1966.

[3] H. A. Wootton and С W. R. Hooker. A Text Book on Chemistry.

[4] The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. N. Y., 1967, p. 1941

[5] Whitehall, H. Structural Essentials of English. N. Y., 1956, p. 64.

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