THE TACTIC OF ADVICE IN THE SPEECH OF FEMALE PERSONAGES IN AMERICAN FEATURE FILMS (A CASE STUDY OF THE MOVIE "CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC")

The research deals with implementing the tactic of advice in the speech of female personages in American feature films presenting a case study of the movie "Confessions of a Shopaholic", which describes the life of a young woman who, despite her painful addiction to buying wardrobe items, writes a column about financial literacy for a fashion magazine. The study integrates sociolinguistic and pragmatic approaches to the analysis of gender-specific female speech, provides information on the history and current state of gender research in linguistics; describes the latest trends in the study of personages’ speech in linguistics and proves the possibility of using American film discourse to study the actually existing speech patterns of representatives of American society. The article aims to identify, describe and classify the linguistic means used by female personages to implement the tactic of advice. The latter is seen as the one which provides the recipient with the advice in the form of a categorical instruction or a non-categorical suggestion about his or her actions and behavior according to the speaker's point of view. The research proves that the advice indicates the higher status of the female speaker, who ascribes to herself the right or demonstrates the desire to control the behavior of the addresser of the advice. Acceptance of advice additionally increases the status of its addressee, the protest against it lowers this status. Categorical advice-instruction is implemented by female characters in the injunctive speech acts and with the help of modal and notional verbs, modal equivalents that have the meaning of the necessity to perform an action. The implementation of non-categorical advice-suggestion by female personages involves the use of a number of means softening the categorical nature of the statement, among which we highlight modal words, verbs and phrases with the meaning of the possible character of the action performance. In the speech of female personages, there exists a combination of instructions and suggestions for the implementation of the tactic of advice. A possible way to reduce the categorical character of advice is to use indirect advice by female personages, which increases the chances of achieving the goal. The tactic of self-help is used by female characters in a conversation with an imaginary interlocutor.