Photos from the family archive as a source for the study of the wedding rite language

Abstract

The article clarifies the role of photos from family archives as a source for the study of wedding ceremonies, its nomination and folk beliefs associated with one of the main family ceremonies. It is noted that photos are important sources for multi-aspect linguistic, ethnographic, culturological, historical research, as they are documents of their time, which are perceived by contemporaries as those providing reliable information. It is emphasized that for the detailed description of the stages, nomination of the wedding ceremony and superstitious beliefs associated with it, researchers usually use detailed questionnaires, but best of all phenomena of all language levels of the sub-dialect are recorded in continuous texts that appear in spontaneous stories. Viewing a photo evokes positive emotions in the speaker and helps to present a story-memory, which is characterized by markers of the time layer “before” (then, those, at that time), cliches, phonetic, lexical, grammatical features, syntactic constructions characteristic of the sub0dialect, which is represented by the narrator. The sources of the article were the family archives of 3 residents of the villages of Butsni and Seferivka of Bar district, Vinnytsia region, which are typical Podillia sub-dialects. The article notes that the nomination of stages, participants and attributes of the wedding ceremony can be revealed by event (depicting individual moments of events, actions, facts of life) and portrait (images of one or more people) photographs. Different photos of the wedding ceremony allow us to trace the reduction of the ceremony itself and the dynamics of the lexical elements that serve it. Keywords: nomination of the wedding ceremony, Podillia sub-dialects, story-memory, Podillia dialect, text-centrism of dialectological research, event and portrait photographs.