Lexical-Semantic and Syntactic Peculiarities of the American Photographic Discourse of the Great Depression (as exemplified by the titles of the American photographs during the period of 1929-1942)

Abstract

The present article describes the analysis of the peculiarities of such a cognitive-communicative phenomenon as American photographic discourse. It contains sociolinguistic and cultural-semiotic particular features. The present complex discourse is analyzed in the context of linguistic synchrony during the period of the Great Depression, the economic crisis that influenced not only the American discursive space but also all the spheres of the American society from 1929 till 1942. The authors typify the photographic discourse as a synthesis of linguistic forms comparing it with the utterance (act of speech) by virtue of its peculiar structural components – persuasion, cognition and purposefulness. The authors conclude that the American photographic discourse combines the inner qualities of the visual, author and critical art (the arts) discourses because of its complex essence. Besides, the lexical representatives of the American photographic discourse of the times of the Depression are defined by a certain semantic peculiarity – absence of the words with the abstract meaning. According to the authors, such a consistency may be explained not only due to the presence of the semantic links with the main “Depression” macro-concept and also due to the certain socio-historical events. The majority of the representatives materializing the micro-concepts possess the negative evaluative connotation as evidenced by the commemoration of the “crisis” integral seme peculiar both for the macro Depression concept and all the micro-concepts (“Poverty”, “Manual Labor”, “Racism”, “Migration”, “Death”, “Disease” and “Protest”). However, the important characteristic of the “Manual Labor” micro-concept is a high frequency rate of the words denoting professions in the sphere of farming and mining. Such a tendency proclaims the US individualistic culture that is focused on the personal initiative and the active combating the difficulties. The analysis of the syntactic means objectified within the framework of the American photographic discourse has demonstrated that the titles of the photographs presented in the form of phrases (word clusters) have a sentence-like essence. Such a characteristic presupposes the presence of the predication and modality features specifically attributed to a sentence. As the result, there has been acknowledged the special complex syntactic status of the titles of the American photographs.