Psycholinguistic peculiarities of speech of the classic heroines of the feminine novel

Abstract

This work presents comparative analysis of the main characters’ speech parts belonging to Elizabeth and Bridget as given in the famous English novels “Pride and Precedence” by Jane Austen and “Bridget Jones’s Diary ” by Helen Fielding, both written in the same language and genre, but separated in time by almost two centuries. The topicality of this study follows from the profound linguo-gnoseological importance of the problems of inner mechanisms between the human cognition and its reflection in their speech. The work looks at communicative organization of the dialogue in the speech parts of Elizabeth Bennett and Bridget Jones. The main objective of this work is to establish regularities in the use of semantically different types of dialogue preferred by the main female characters of these typically feminine novels. The paper considers such problems as concretisation of the concepts of language and speech personality, speech portrait and communicative personality; the cultural and historical basis motivating psychological characteristics of Elizabeth and Bridget; and poly functionality of the dialogue parts of the both heroines studied in the aspect of the communicative techniques used by the both girls. Conceptually the analysis undertaken rests on the presumption that it is possible to penetrate into the depths of person’s cognition and emotional state through his/her speech, on the other hand, we note that a person’s speech does not always reflect his/her real thoughts and emotions, but can hide true feelings and motives due to the implicative character of the speech communication. Hence, a speech portrait, as a forming component of the speech personality, is not a functional model of it, but a functional implementation of this model from the point of view of reconstruction of a speech personality. Therefore, a comprehensive analysis of the speech portrait of the virtual speaker is aimed at reconstructing his/her lingual cognition. Comparing the communicative varieties of the typical dialogue organisation of the novels under study, in our work we investigate seven communicatively different types of the main characters’ dialogues. The work results in the conclusion about similarity of the psycholinguistic peculiarities of the dialogue parts of the female personages studied.