Genre specificity of the communicative event "photo viewing"

A wide spread of the theory of speech genres in modern linguistics has led to a necessity for comparison of the term "genre" with such communicative units as situation, event, act. The communicative event is defined as "restricted in time and space, motivated, holistic, socially determined process of verbal interaction of communicants"; in this case, textual realization of the communicative event is a hypergenre as a holistic complex of monological and dialogical genres. Presenting "photo viewing" as a specific communicative event of friends or family communication, we consider the hypergenre "conversation during the photo viewing" as its textual realization. The informative dialogue is the primary speech genre in its structure. This genre is constructed from the question-answer phrases; by means of these phrases the main information about photos is reported (who is depicted in the photo, time and place when it was taken). The basis of the informative dialogue is formed by the elementary speech genre "message". Its main variations are message as naming what is shown in the photo, message as a description of the situation reflected in the photo and message as a comment on the action which is performed in the photo. Another important component of the complex speech genre "informative dialogue" is the genre "assessment" and its special type, the genre of self-assessment. It is important that negative self-assessment is most typical for the communicative event "photo viewing". Generally, the informative dialogue functions as the beginning of the conversation during photo viewing. Then it can be replaced by other genres such as a conversation on general topics, to a greater or lesser extent related to the image in the photo, and recollection. The speech genre "recollection" plays a special role in the analyzed hypergenre: it realizes the main function of the photos: "accumulation of memory". Depending on the communicative intentions of the speakers, the genre "recollection" can be realized in the various forms of text: 1) as a "compressed message" with a much larger content which is not expressed verbally; 2) as a holistic, thematically coherent story, whose formal boundaries in the dialogue structure are the phrases of other communication participants. As a rule, the subject of recollections is directly associated with the image in the photo; however, by the law of associative connection this relation can be broken.

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