Ategorization of attribution as a technique for determining the percularities of a lingustic personality’s individual style

The article deals with the issue of formalizing the individual style of an English-speaking journalist as exemplified in the categorization of attribution. The individual style is understood as a system of logic and semantic ways of representing the dominant personal implications of the author’s conceptual system, objectified in their esthetic activities and suggesting individual transformation of verbal expressions. To study the individual style, it is proposed to use the methods of applied linguistics, namely, lexical statistics, for the analysis of text extracts of a certain author and their subsequent comparison with the results obtained on other writers’ texts. The article gives the results of attribution category analysis and the peculiarities of lexical and thematic structure of a personality’s vocabulary in the texts of English-speaking journalists Suzy Menkes and Hamish Bowles on the topic of fashion. Among the most frequent semantic groups are the descriptive categories of colour, toponymy, time, and size. The comparative analysis of the statistic charts has revealed that though various semantic groups are present in the texts of both journalists, the mini-corpus of texts by H. Bowles features the categories of shape and material more frequently than that of S. Menkes’s texts rich in the descriptive categories.