Front Lines Correspondence: Typology of Letter-Writers

The research features letters written by soldiers of the Great Patriotic War. It focuses on the written speech skills of military letter-writers and their written speech personalities. The study involved the method of scientific description and the comparative analysis. The article introduces such terms as natural written speech, linguistic personality, written speech personality, and text. War correspondence is an example of natural written speech. Based on N. B. Lebedeva's authentic typology of the written-speech personality, the authors defined five types of linguistic personalities and arranged them according to the inclusion of the letter-writer in the written code. The scale ranges from letter-writers with a poor command of the written language and those who easily switched from oral to written speech. The latter were eager to use the written channel of communication as a means of self-expression.