Precedent Names of Non-native culture-bound Elements in the discourse of Russian political advertisement

Abstract

The paper studies the cognitive and pragmatic aspect of functioning particularities of precedent names in multimodal videotexts of Russian political advertisement. The importance of investigating the meaning-making mechanisms involving precedent names as cultural signs in political discourse determines the research topicality. Special attention is devoted to the issues of actualization of extralinguistic information with the help of precedent onyms and concomitant non-verbal signs. The study raises the question of semantic diversification of precedent names in the context of Russian political advertisement. The research material involves the texts of political advertising video clips created during the presidential campaigns in Russia from 1990s to the present time. The analysis of the text corpus in compliance with the cognitive and discursive approach has allowed to determine the main concepts represented by the precedent names and characterize their role in the worldview conveyed in the studied videotexts. The research has revealed a wide range of spheres of concepts encompassing the studied precedent names, such as history, politics, geography, international conflicts and wars, art, fairy tales and cartoons, economy and mass media. Different ways of correlation of verbal and non-verbal signs that actualize precedent onyms in the studied videotexts are discovered in the research. The analysis of pragmatic impact of the text involving precedent names has unveiled certain sense transformations: the intensification of particular semantic components aimed at addressing certain pragmatic tasks. The main functions of precedent names are expressive, emotive, illustrative and pragmatic ones. The majority of precedent onyms under consideration relate to European, North American and Asian culture-bound elements. The worldview represented by these precedent names reflects political opinions of the participants in the communicative events as well as topical trends in Russian political rhetoric.