Wall Street as a symbol of money power in American media discourse
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15330/jpnuphil.11.108-115Keywords:
Wall Street, symbol, image, evaluation, evaluative adjectives, personification, allusionAbstract
The article analyzes the inherent characteristics of Wall Street as a symbol of the power of money in the American media discourse. A multifaceted phenomenon of semantic cognition, a symbol encodes the information that unfolds against the backdrop of a cultural context. The meaning of a symbol correlates with the meaning of a linguistic sign that represents it in the discourse. Embodying established cultural ideas and hedonistic principles of enjoying power through wealth, a name of geographical feature of New York, Wall Street, becomes associated with the symbol of money power. Through metonymy, the name of a place is connected to an idea of the moral qualities and behavior of people whose activities are carried out in that place.
In media discourse, the lexical unit Wall Street acquires a negative evaluative meaning expressed in adjectives, personifications and allusions that carry implications and attitudes on the part of the speakers. Personifications reinforce the symbol of power in the public consciousness by specifying the image of a human whose behavior is easy to interpret unlike the activities of the country's financial machine. Based on historical events, allusions relate a contemporary assessment of money power to the interpretation of historical events, thus providing a deeper understanding of the societal perception of Wall Street.
The data for analysis is extracted from printed newspapers, digital periodicals and films from the period of 1891 to 2015. The research methodology rests on the premise that the symbol of money power associated with Wall Street evokes social response, represented in media discourse. The complex of methods applied in the research include media monitoring, conceptual, interpretive, and semantic analyses. The results of the study testify steadily negative attitude to Wall Street as the symbol of money power. Criticism of those who provide functioning of country's powerful financial structure is amplified in times of economic challenges.
