Abstract—In the focus of the article is the comparative study of the society code used in the upper classes of Great Britain and the USA. Though claiming to be democratic, free and deprived of class system permeating British society, Americans, nonetheless, assimilated the society code and introduced into it its own cultural characteristics that help identify an American upper class person/character. The study of the American novel by Amor Towles
Rules of Civility and the British novels by Julian Fellowes, Jeffrey Archer and Charles Jennings has proved that the society code is shared likewise by British and American upper classes and constituted by a core of verbal and non-verbal characteristics, though, there exist differences in the use of socially marked words determined by American culture. The core of non-verbal ‘signs’ of the in-group members is made up of the words describing items of clothing and manner of behavior that unambiguously indicate the social status of the speaker. The verbal core includes school identifiers, words denoting drinks (champagne) and adjectives.
Index Terms—Society code, upper classes, Great Britain, the USA, comparative study, verbal and non-verbal characteristics, literature.
Tatiana Ivushkina is with English Department №3 at MGIMO (University), Moscow, Russia (email: Tatiana.ivushkina@gmail.com).
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Cite:Tatiana A. Ivushkina, "British-American Parallels in the Artistic Representation of the Upper Classes of Society," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 149-153, 2018.