PRAGMATIC FEATURES OF PRECEDENT UNITS WITH MYTHOLOGICAL ALLUSION IN MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

Precedent units with mythological allusions as special textual elements with wide pragmatic potential are considered in the article from the point of view of their functioning in modern British media discourse, the most wide-scale version of modern text representation. Precedent units of different origin are actively used in modern language because the “eternal” concepts they embody, symbolize, and actualise the recipient’s background knowledge, which is essential for media discourse. The study describes and illustrates the main functions of precedent units in media language — nominative, expressivedecorative, persuasive, password (password-identifying), ludic (game, or the function of language game creation), euphemistic, affecting. The material for the study was a variety of sources, including UK periodicals. The illustrative material demonstrates the pragmatic features of the functioning of precedent units, their semantic derivation, and the increase of meanings in the process of linguistic perceptualisation. It is proved that the use of precedent units is extremely productive in the implementation of the author’s intentions in media discourse. It is concluded that the pragmatics of the precedent units is addressed to the paradigm of cognitive, discursive and communicative characteristics, which allows to perceive the text as a unified system. The prospect of further research can extend to a comparative analysis of precedent units with mythological allusions in different languages in the context of mass media in order to identify the cognitive and pragmatic universal components, as well as to describe the algorithm of linguistic influence on the potential audience through the subjectification of internal content and individual author’s interpretation of the main cultural and social references recorded in world literature.