Literary words of foreign origin as social markers in Jeffrey Archer’s novels

The paper is aimed at studying the use of literary words of foreign origin in modern fiction from a sociolinguistic point of view, which presupposes establishing a correlation between this category of words in a speech portrayal or narrative and a social status of the speaker, and verifying that they serve as indices of socially privileged identity in British literature of the XX1st century. This research is the continuation of the diachronic sociolinguistic study of the upper-class speech portrayals which has traced the distinctive features in their speech and has revealed that literary words of foreign origin unambiguously testify to the social position of a character/speaker and serve as social indices. The question arises then whether it holds true for modern upper-class speakers/speech portrayals, given all the transformations a new millennium has brought about. To this end we have selected 60 contexts from two novels by Jeffrey Archer - Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (2004) and A Prisoner of Birth (2008) , and subjected them to a careful examination. A graduate from Oxford and representative of socially privileged classes, Archer gives a wide depiction of characters with different social backgrounds and statuses. The analysis of the novels based on the contextual and functional approaches to the study enabled us to categorize the selected words into four relevant groups. The first class represented by terms ( commodity, debenture, assets, luminescence, etc.) serves to unambiguously indicate education, occupation, and fields of knowledge or communicative situations in which a character is involved. The second class is formed of words used in conjunction with their Germanic counterparts ( perspiration - sweat, padre - priest, convivial - friendly ) to contrast the social position of the characters: literary words serving as social indices of upper class speakers, whereas their synonyms of Germanic origin characterize middle or lower class speech portrayals. The third class of words comprises socially marked words (verbs, nouns and adjectives), or U-words (the term first coined by Allan Ross and Nancy Mitford), the status acquired in the course of social history development (elegant, excellent, sophistication, authoritative, preposterous, etc .) . The fourth class includes words used in a humorous or ironic meaning to convey the narrator’s attitude to the characters or the situation itself ( ministrations, histrionic, etc.). Words of this group are perceived as stylistic “aliens”, as they create incongruity between style and subject matter. The social implication of the selected words is enhanced by French words and phrases often accompanying them.