Precedent Phenomena of Contemporary Russian and Spanish Massmedia as Cognitive Structures of Language Personality

Abstract

The relevance of the research is due to the scientific interest in the precedent phenomenon, which occupies an important place in the discursive paradigm of the Russian and Spanish languages. Precedent phenomena that translate traditional cultural values and newly created ones are more widely represented in the language of mass media – the main communicatively significant environment of modern society. Today, the media offer us a certain media picture in which the world is not displayed but interpreted. The role of precedent phenomena in the medial space organization and their functioning in the media text, which is characterized by the maximum degree of intertextuality, is studied using the material of the Russian and Spanish languages. The cognitive approach proposed in the article is aimed at revealing the role of knowledge (linguistic, non-linguistic, individual) in the formation of the value of the precedent unit, which is the primary object of research in cognitive science. Using the example of universal precedent names (Napoleon, Cinderella, Don Quixote, Adam), it is shown that they fix the culturally significant (thematic) knowledge shared by the communicants, usually functioning in an implicit form. The study of binary structures (meaning) of the concept captures the dynamics of the development of the precedent name’s significance, actual changes in the construction of the core components of sense, the desemantization of the precedent name. Differences in interpretation in Russian and Spanish indicate different dominant significant content and show that the scientific significance of the invariant of universal precedent names reflects not the reality as such, but the cognitive structures of the linguistic personality of a particular society.