I. YAKOVLEV CHUVASH STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY BULLETIN

precedent composition, precedent phenomena, precedence, internet meme, polycode text

The article examines the internet meme as a polycode object of digital communication, the reproducibility and recognizability of which are ensured not only by precedent texts, images, or statements but also by stable methods of their compositional organization. The relevance of the study is due to the lack of a conceptual apparatus in modern linguistics that would allow describing the composition of an internet meme as an independent level of precedent realization, irreducible either to genre characteristics or to individual precedent phenomena. The research material consisted of a targeted selection of templated internet memes from visual composition generator websites. The study employs methods of structural-semantic and discourse analysis, as well as elements of an interpretive approach. As a result, the concept of precedent composition is introduced and substantiated as a stable, culturally recognizable scheme for correlating the verbal and visual components of an internet meme. A typology of precedent compositions is proposed based on the dominant recognition mechanism: integrative, verbally identifiable, and visually identifiable. It is concluded that precedence in internet memes is realized not only at the level of individual codes but also at the level of compositional structure, which ensures the variability and replicability of memes in the digital environment.

Shchukina, Kira Aleksandrovna – Candidate of Philology, Associate Professor of the Department of Russian as a Foreign Language and Methods of Teaching, Saint Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russia, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0573-173X, k.shukina@spbu.ru, kira_a@list.ru