THE DOMINANT FEATURES OF THE BRITISH COMMUNICATIVE BEHAVIOUR

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the dominant features of the British communicative behaviour in John Fowles’s collection of works. Attention is focused on the concept spheres analysis of the English people and identification of their national peculiarities by means of defining the principal cultural concepts, id est highlighting the features that testify the ethnic originality of people. The investigation of the national concept spheres is one of the means to turn out the uniqueness and universality of the corresponding culture. The author examines the communicative behaviour of the British in the standard communicative situations to which we remove the situations of establishing contact, its maintaining/completing and conducting the discussion. For the carriers of the British culture it is not typical to express emotions – in accordance with “unwritten rules” it is worth that one should conceal his/her emotions, commutating thus an attention on feelings of others. Such emotional restraint of the British, as it is known, is entrenched in the traditions of Protestant upbringing that prescribes to hold one’s open manifestation of emotions practically in all the living situations. For the carriers of the British culture the emotional behavior is connected first of all with irrationality, subjectivity and other negative characteristics. The result asserts the fact that the British communicative culture does not possess the specialized speech acts of call and remark and a piece of advice in the form of indirect modification of behavior is less spread in the British, than, for example, in the Ukrainian culture of communication. It is postulated the idea that the personal space is very important nonverbal component of the British culture. The British possess the greater personal space than the Ukrainians do. The British are too restraint to physical contacts during the communication and ignorance of it may cause its infelicity. In general, knowledge of rules and norms of nonverbal communication in another culture helps avoid different incidents that may be caused by lack of perception of them. By analogy with the spatial language there exists the unrepeatable language of time that helps manifest an attitude to a person, depicting one’s place in the social hierarchy.