The Indexation Of Precedent Texts In Mass Media: Raising The Issue

Abstract

The article delineates some issues connected with previously conducted research on the intertextual game with culturally and socially prominent texts in the media which is on the one hand said to have purely aesthetic meaning, and on the other – used only for achieving pragmatic goals. In this article the author raises the issue of the indexation of these texts that are commonly known as ‘precedent’ in Russian linguistics – quotations, proverbs, names, etc. The procedure is to be carried out to understand whether the first or the second thesis is true which might sound speculative without any figures. Above all this indexation can help define communicative and pragmatic value of the precedent text used in the intertextual game for the needs of journalism and media industry. The given article focuses on the first three steps of the generally planned research leading to working out methods for the indexation and is based on the examples of precedent texts from Russian quality newspaper headlines. These steps include manual selection of examples; their qualitative and quantitative evaluation; the validation of their recognition through the questionnaire to find out the primal list of mostly recognized phrases. It was discovered, that mainly proverbs, and sayings are on the list – both in the selection from newspapers and in the top-recognized examples from the questionnaire. Now morphological and syntactical features of this material should be studied at the next stage to process it then through the system of grapho-semantic modeling to reach the final goal of the research.