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VOICE AND MANNERS AS SOCIAL INDICES

T. Ivushkina

Abstract

The article focuses on voice and manners (manner of speaking and behavior) as social indices implicitly attributing social standing to a speaker/character. Modern British and American literature allows us to draw parallels between two cultures in the way the upper-class characters are depicted in novels and through the prism of voice and manners descriptions come to the conclusion that there is one shared code of prosodic and behavioral signs unambiguously indicating a characterВ’s belongingness to the upper classes of society. Territorial and cultural peculiarities, however, can be seen through the universal characteristics, which prove that the universal and the specific always coexist and convey a reader/speaker a lot of information of social, cultural, educational, etc. layers to infer. The novels by British writers ? Julian Fellowes The Past Imperfect (2009), Jeffrey ArcherВ’s A Prisoner of Birth (2008) and Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less (2004), Charles JenningsВ’s A Season Among the Upper Classes (1998), and the American novel by Amor Towles Rules of Civility (2011) served as the material for the comparative analysis. The results of the research contribute to a further study of British-American parallels in the upper-class representation in fiction and should be regarded as inseparable part of it.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2018/3.6/S14.091

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