Прецедентные имена как злемент российской языковой личности : на материале заголовков современных медиа-текстов

This article is devoted to problems inherent to modern mass media. A lot of media articles have titles that make use of names from Russian literature and films and the names of actual persons from Russian history. We call these "precedent names," and while they are well known to the Russian people, they are most often unfamiliar or strange to foreigners. Without knowledge of a name's background, it is impossible to understand the intention of an article or the attitude of the author of a media text. It is also sometimes difficult to identify the titles that make use of such quotations and even if a student understands that a title is making use of a precedent name, the problem of finding it in a dictionary remains. There is only one dictionary of precedent phenomena in Russian, although some precedents can be found in the dictionary of winged words. However, there is the additional problem that very often an author will use a transformed precedent name that is not represented in any dictionary. Therefore, it is necessary to create a special dictionary for precedent names which are used in the titles of media texts and for their transformations. In this paper, we have tried to describe precedent names that were used in the titles of media texts and more than 90 examples were placed in 8 semantic groups. The strongest positions are those of the title and subtitle of a text, and at the beginning and end of paragraphs. If the foreign reader is able to find and understand phrases located in these positions, he will then be able to understand the whole text more easily.