PRECEDENT PHENOMENA IN A NEWSPAPER MACROTEXT: FUNCTIONAL PECULIARITIES

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the functioning of precedent phenomena in a newspaper macrotext. A newspaper macrotext is a large communicative formation, consisting of a set of newspaper articles covering one topic, published in a number of consecutive issues of the same newspaper, characterized by the consistency of the authors' views and forming a communicative unity. The inclusion of newspaper articles into an integral structure with a single semantic core is carried out both due to internal factors (time, space, person depicted in the text) and to external factors of communication (author, reader, reference situation, precedent situation). There have been studied two corpora of articles about crisis situations Foot and mouth epidemic and Flooding in Great Britain which were covered in the English-language periodical Sunday Telegraph in 2001 and 2014, respectively, with the total volume of 108 texts. The purpose of the study is to determine the role of precedent phenomena in the construction of the denotative space of a newspaper macrotext describing the ongoing crisis situation and in the structuring of its chronotope. Several plans are singled out in the temporal structure of a newspaper macrotext: the plan of the present, the future and the past. The plan of the past time consists of the plan of the past itself and the precedent past time. As for the plan of the precedent past, here are presented the temporal parameters of events which are not part of the cause-and-effect relationship, but are precedent, thematically related to the actual crisis events and have an explanatory value. Spatial as well as chronological parameters are important elements of the investigated precedent crisis situations, contributing to the construction of the denotative space of the macrotext. On the one hand, information about precedent events and situations is aimed at filling information gaps. On the other hand, the indication of precedent phenomena within the denotative space of the macrotext gives the reader the opportunity to interpret the current crisis situation with the help of the existing code.