The precedent phenomenon of “Crime and Punishment” in Russian media discourse

Abstract

The comprehensive study of the title of the novel “Crime and Punishment” by F.M. Dostoevsky as a source of precedence in the texts of Russian media is presented. The relevance of the research is determined by the need to study fiction as a valuable source of precedence in modern media discourse. Manipulative nature of modern media implies the expansion of the spheres-sources of precedence, appealing to the cultural background of the Russian linguistic culture bearers. The authors prove that the formation of the actual media space is based on a wide set of connotatively marked linguistic means, used as a tool to influence the potential reader. On the example of the precedent construction “Crime and Punishment”, appealing to the title of the famous novel by F.M. Dostoevsky, semantic-pragmatic and transformational features of precedent constructions and the specificity of their associative potential in the perception and interpretation in the Russian linguistic culture are illustrated. The research material includes texts of electronic media covering international, state, and regional issues and problems from 2017 to 2022. The research results are ensured by a wide repertoire of publications reflecting various aspects of society and state development. The card index included contexts (corpus of 120 examples), objectifying important social, economic, and political problems for modern society. The component and contextual analysis, distributive method, linguistic modeling were applied. Further study of the precedent phenomena appealing to fiction could present a valuable fragment of the media picture of the world, including the corpus of texts significant for the Russian linguistic culture.