Abstract
Aim.
To conduct a sociolinguistic analysis to study the impact of changes in John Dos Passos’s political discourse and the participants in the social context created by him in his literary works on the semantics of the content plan of these texts, determining the impact of these changes on the expression plan of these texts / discourse at the stylistic level.
Methodology.
A sociolinguistic analysis of the genre (content and expression) of texts / discourse at the stylistic level has been conducted. The study is based on excerpts from the works of John Dos Passos, selected using the continuous sampling method and according to the specific semantics of communicative situations. The text fragments reflect the evolution of John Dos Passos’s political views and positions, and they verbalise his speech and thought activity (political discourse) in this area of society. The study uses descriptive and comparative methods, as well as the method of stylistic analysis of selected text passages from the author's political discourse and the participants in the social context created by the author. The results are interpreted.
Results.
A sociolinguistic analysis of the genre of Dos Passos’s literary texts shows that changes in the content of the genre of these texts, as well as in the author’s political discourse, influenced the expression of the genre in the social context of the political life of the United States in the last century. These changes, particularly at the stylistic and syntactic levels, vary over time, ranging from a fragmented style with newspaper headlines and slogans to a concise and rigorous presentation, which helps the writer to create a specific social context based on the extralinguistic factors of the time, as well as to express their position on important political events. The sociolinguistic characteristics of the selected texts: newspaper headlines, slogans, documents, speech of participants in various communicative situations, as well as stylistic devices: paradox, antithesis, metaphor, parallelism, symbolism, gradation, rhetorical questions, irony, sarcasm, metonymy, montage and "camera obscura", etc. enhance the social significance of these texts and reveal the evolution of their author's political discourse, reflecting the change of his beliefs and constant internal struggle. In the modern context, Dos Passos’s works raise important questions, making them relevant to the global political community and helping to understand the political rhetoric and discourse of the United States and Western countries.
Research implications.
The application of the sociolinguistic method for the analysis of social reality and the behaviour of participants in communicative situations in a broad social context contributes to a deeper understanding of the history of the United States, its contemporary political rhetoric, and the priorities of political discourse in this country. The results of the study confirm the effectiveness of using sociolinguistic analysis methods for the genre of literary texts to identify socially marked expressions and constructions, which allows for the extraction and interpretation of new social knowledge present in other texts and works by authors.