THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SOCIAL-AREAL CHARACTERISTICS FOR FORMATION OF THE “BRITISH VOTER” LINGUOCULTURAL TYPE

The paper determines the main characteristics of the notion of “linguocultural type” from the point of view of linguopersonology and considers its relationship with the adjacent units used within the frames of other lines of linguistic research comparing with the notion of “sociolect”, which is the major unit of social dialectology. To achieve the set task, the author specifies the subject field of the linguocultural type of “British voter” as the communicative-relevant concept of British linguoculture. The author considers the main characteristics of modern linguistic view of Great Britain, studies the changes occurred within the frames of language norm of Received Pronunciation, and defines the major types of social and areal language variants and their characteristics. The paper analyzes key modern research approaches to the Estuary English social-areal dialect suggested by foreign and native linguists-dialectologists as well as the attempts of the scientific description of this phenomenon comparing it with the normative phonetic variant of Received Pronunciation. The author studies the main reasons of “democratization” of pronunciation norm of British variant of English language. Using the analysis of characteristic linguistic properties of communicative behavior of British Tory parliamentarians (on the example both of the party management and the grassroots of the House of Representatives) in various communicative situations, the author makes an attempt to assess the significance of social-areal pronunciation variants in political communication of the ruling party with the voters. The author carries out the analysis of possible linguistic and extra-linguistic factors causing the phonetic special characteristics of the communicative behavior of Tory as well as evaluates the efficiency of the audience pronunciation norm imitation as the communicative strategy. Based on the results, the author reconstructs the speech characteristics of the modeled collective linguistic persona in order to define the social background of a typified voter.