The British and American gentlemen as portrayed in the novel The Remains of the Day by Кazuo Ishiguro

In the focus of the article is a comparative sociolinguistic analysis of the speech and manners of the British and American gentlemen as portrayed in the novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. The study enables us to look into the deep-rooted English traditions and values against which the American cultural distinctness is brought to light. The underlying British culture ‘the master – butler dyad’ is a marker of the aristocratic culture and us-them divide. The analysis is based on the selection of culturally marked elements of speech and manners of the English lord and the American gentleman (linguistic and extralinguistic) approached from sociolinguistic, semantic, interpretative and comparative perspectives and aimed at revealing common and culturally specific characteristics. The study has demonstrated that the English lord confides in his butler, his manner of interaction is based on the principle of mutual respect and manifested by his voice, always calm and gentle; he actively participates in making pivotal political decisions; his speech is marked by U-words (‘a chap’, adjectives ‘awfully’, ‘terribly’, ‘jolly’, ‘quite’), borrowings and the phenomena of understatement and overstatement. The American gentleman is portrayed as a businesslike and easy going master with a trusting manner of behavior, at the same time always bantering and humiliating a butler, thus putting him in an awkward situation. He is more generous in money spending; his speech is marked by ‘technical language’. Bantering is seen as a symbol of American culture and a new style of life.

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