Means of simile actualization in the language of modern social groups in England

The purpose of the article is to reveal the means of expressing simile in the speech of characters belonging to modern upper, middle and lower classes, based on the texts of contemporary English fiction: Caryl Churchill «Top Girls», Patrick Marber «Dealer’s Choice» and India Knight «Comfort and Joy». Conducting speech analysis, the authors use the sociolinguistic approach, allowing to take into account the social class of the speaker. The article demonstrates that the choice of different language means for conveying simile is dictated by such specific characteristics of the social layer to which communicants pertain as leading values, level of education, income, and the degree of freedom in expressing emotions. The article concludes that simile in speech of upper class representatives is expressed by neutral vocabulary to convey positive emotions and informal vocabulary to demonstrate hyperbolized negative evaluation, reflecting a critical and ironic evaluation of everyday events. Simile in the statements of middle class speakers is expressed in formal vocabulary, French words, rhymes, political terms, clichés, deformed phraseological units, which reflect the desire to imitate the upper classes, indicate modesty and self-doubt of the communicants. Simile in the judgments of lower-class Englishmen is conveyed by argotisms, helping to express an outburst of negative emotions, as well as by religious and literary allusions that are misused and contain an abundance of logical errors.