Kulyna O. Last Will and Testament as a socio-communicative phenomenon (based on English Last Wills and Testamnets of the mid XIX – early XXI centuries).

The research is carried out in the anthropocentric paradigm of modern linguistic studies based on formal, functional and operational coordinate systems. The thesis postulates that genre of Last Will and Testament belongs to a genre palette of testamentary discourse which is considered to be a subtype of legal descourse. Compositional and semantic genre structure is modelled and discursive markers are proved to provide their integrity. The classification of Last Wills and Testaments is proposed based on structural and communicative features. Lexical features of the given texts are established and lexical and semantic groups of anthropocentric lexis which are common for this genre are singled out. Non-predicative syntactic structures in which the mentioned lexis is used are analysed. Genre performative modelling is carried out and it is proposed to consider English Last Will and Testament to be a complex performative.