ADDRESS FORM AS A REFLECTION OF ETHNO-CULTURAL STYLE OF COMMUNICATION (based on British and Canadian English)

Culture and the process of communication are interrelated, since culture not only indicates between which members of the society a communication act is possible, but also helps to decode correctly the meaning of the message that was encoded, and also according to what conditions the message would be correctly interpreted by the interlocutor. The historically established ethno-cultural style of communication (T. Larina) reflects the communicative peculiarities of people’s behavior when choosing verbal and non-verbal means in the process of communication. The article is devoted to sociocultural features that influence the choice of language means for expressing an initial speech formula. The aim of our research is to examine address forms in the boundaries of one language but in two different countries (Canada, Great Britain) with their historical and cultural background. We draw on Cultural Dimensions of G. Hofstede (1991), the Theory of Politeness (Brown & Levinson 1987, Leech 2014), the background of Intercultural Pragmatics (A. Wierzbicka 2003, I. Kecskes 2014), Speech Accommodation Theory (Giles 1977) and etc. The article presents the results of the study on the usage of address forms among the representatives of British English (BrE) and Canadian English (CanE) in order to identify similarities and differences and to explain the results according to cultural characteristics.