Psycholinguistic and Sociolinguistic Parameters of Upper-Class Ageing Women's Speech.

Abstract

The paper is devoted to lexical units that mark the speech of upper-class ageing women in English drama of the end of the twentieth century. The aim of the present study is to show how the age of the character is reflected in the speech structure: lexico-phraseological, grammatical and syntactic models with content-conceptual basis and implicit temporal localization traits. To achieve this goal the plays of modern English writers were chosen as a material for the research. It is concluded that age-specific speech characteristics of senior women with high social position depend on psychological formations of elderly age, new social status, leading activities of this period, commitment to established views, values, loss of the leading role in the family, violation of life stereotypes, experiences and self-isolation. The combination of lexical and syntactic elements is also based on the need to adapt to new external (social) and internal (personal) changes.