Precedent Phenomena in Spanish Media Discourse: Semantic and Syntactic Transformations

Abstract

Reflecting the national culture and mentality of the people, Spanish media discourse has been developing and transforming and has undergone significant changes in its structure as well as cognitive, semantic and pragmatic potential. In addition to informing the reader, its purpose is to exert a hidden impact on public opinion and behaviour. In particular, this is achieved due to the high degree of metaphoricalness of the author’s text, which ensures the recipient’s involvement in discursive decoding. Precedent phenomena in media discourse are an effective tool of meaning making. By conveying additional aesthetic and value characteristics, they increase the semantic content of discursive messages and the number of values anchored in precedents in the cognitive base of the representative of a given linguoculture. The scientific importance of this paper lies in extending the research on the linguopragmatic potential of precedent phenomena in Spanish media discourse by describing their discursive transformations. In terms of practical significance, the results obtained through the study of the Spanish national worldview can be used to form basic background knowledge of foreign affairs specialists when learning Spanish. The lexical and syntactic analysis of the precedent phenomena functioning in media discourse showed that Spanish media texts make extensive use of transformed precedent phenomena, including neologisms that name new concepts and enhance the creativity of journalistic materials. As a result of the study, precedent phenomena were classified according to the following types of semantic, morphological and syntactic transformations: lexical substitution of a component in the context of a precedent statement, text or situation; inclusion of a precedent word in another precedent text to generate new meanings; creation of precedent neologisms by means of nominal composition or morphological derivation.