Abstract
The paper is aimed at studying the use of literary words of foreign origin in modern fiction from a sociolinguistic point of view, which presupposes establishing a correlation between this category of words in a speech portrayal or narrative and a social status of the speaker, and verifying that they serve as indices of socially privileged identity in British literature of the XX1st century. This research is the continuation of the diachronic sociolinguistic study of the upper-class speech portrayals which has traced the distinctive features in their speech and has revealed that literary words of foreign origin unambiguously testify to the social position of a character/speaker and serve as social indices. The question arises then whether it holds true for modern upper-class speakers/speech portrayals, given all the transformations a new millennium has brought about. To this end we have selected 60 contexts from two novels by Jeffrey Archer - Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (2004) and A Prisoner of Birth (2008) , and subjected them to a careful examination. A graduate from Oxford and representative of socially privileged classes, Archer gives a wide depiction of characters with different social backgrounds and statuses. The analysis of the novels based on the contextual and functional approaches to the study enabled us to categorize the selected words into four relevant groups. The first class represented by terms ( commodity, debenture, assets, luminescence, etc.) serves to unambiguously indicate education, occupation, and fields of knowledge or communicative situations in which a character is involved. The second class is formed of words used in conjunction with their Germanic counterparts ( perspiration - sweat, padre - priest, convivial - friendly ) to contrast the social position of the characters: literary words serving as social indices of upper class speakers, whereas their synonyms of Germanic origin characterize middle or lower class speech portrayals. The third class of words comprises socially marked words (verbs, nouns and adjectives), or U-words (the term first coined by Allan Ross and Nancy Mitford), the status acquired in the course of social history development (elegant, excellent, sophistication, authoritative, preposterous, etc .) . The fourth class includes words used in a humorous or ironic meaning to convey the narrators attitude to the characters or the situation itself ( ministrations, histrionic, etc.). Words of this group are perceived as stylistic aliens, as they create incongruity between style and subject matter. The social implication of the selected words is enhanced by French words and phrases often accompanying them.
Highlights
On the face of it, literary words are self-explanatory: they explicitly refer to a literary style connected with literary traditions, writing and, education
Both literary and colloquial words bear connotations opposite in their nature: loftiness, elevation, poeticism and archaism, solemnity and grandiloquence associated with literary words, and informality, intimacy and friendliness associated with colloquial ones (Crystal 2010: 38-45)
Central to this research are the words of foreign origin, primarily French, Greek and Latin, which successfully assimilated into the English language and are often not perceived as loan words
Summary
On the face of it, literary words are self-explanatory: they explicitly refer to a literary style connected with literary traditions, writing and, education They became part of English culture and language historically, as the result of conquests (the Norman conquest being the longest of them) and the influence of Latin, French and Greek, which immensely contributed to the development of English literature (the first literary works were translations from these languages) but scientific and society language as well. Central to this research are the words of foreign origin, primarily French, Greek and Latin, which successfully assimilated into the English language and are often not perceived as loan words This category of words has been revealed to be part and parcel of upper class portrayals in the English literature (Ivushkina 2012, 2017)
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