The thesis focuses on linguo-pragmatic and socio-linguistic aspects of the personages' communicative style in Modern American drama. The concept of communicative style has been introduced into linguistic studies in the domain of intercultural communication where it is defined as a systemic configuration of language, speech and extralinguistic means, selection and application of which are motivated by individual as a speaker. At the same time in the research which deals with the style of the individual communicative style is viewed as a prevailing manner of speaking or a mode of speech behavior. Thus the two main approaches to the communicative style analysis are singled out: a pragmatic one which allows specifying pragmatic-oriented communicative styles based on the target setting of the interaction and a sociolinguistic one which takes into account the correlation between such status characteristics of the speaker as social role, gender, age, education and racial identity and their status-oriented communicative styles. The following components of the communicative style are identified: rules and conventions of communication, communicative behavior, strategies, tactics and speech acts. The methods employed in the research comprise conversational, contextual-interpretational, pragmatic, speech act and stylistic analyses and aims at specifying tactic, speech act and lexical-stylistic peculiarities of personages' communicative styles. Confrontative communicative style is based on the strategy of confrontation and is performed with the help of such tactics as threat and intimidation with the menace speech acts, offence with the evaluative speech acts, discredit with constative speech acts, order with the injunctive speech acts, ignoring and provocation. Cooperative communicative style is based on the strategy of cooperation and is actualized with the tactic of compliment and praise with the evaluative speech acts, request with the requestive speech acts, conviction with argumentative speech acts, promice with the promisive speech acts, advice with the suggestive speech acts, sympathy and comfort. Communicative style of different age groups reveals the tendency of using aggressive patterns of style in the teen-age years and shifting to cooperative patterns later. While women tend to stick to the cooperative communicative style, men take effort to dominate in the dyad. Communicative style of undereducated personages is characterized by the violation of communication norms, usage of vulgarisms, slang, incorrect grammar constructions. Afro-Americans with a low level of education employ vulgarisms, slangisms, incorrect grammar forms and constructions together with demonstrating aggressive attitude to the representatives of other communities.
