Structural and semantic peculiarities of the verbal game in British mass-media discourse precedent statements

   The verbal game is a highly wide-spread subject of modern scientific research in arts and humanities. An eLIBRARY.RU keyword search of “verbal game” suggests 2198 scientific publications. The abundance of verbal play investigations is due to various reasons. One of the reasons is a broad range of verbal play interpretations – from the whole scope of human existence, including all the types of human activity (such a broad interpretation of the verbal play can be called “total gamification”), to a joke, a pun. Another reason is the epoch of post-modernity, which characterizes the present-day world and which is distinguished by the expression of freedom, uniqueness, a search for one’s own way and identity. The verbal game is a bright manifestation of the epoch of post-modernity. This paper is focused on the investigation of the verbal game in the context of precedent statements. This dimension of verbal play investigations is determined by the fact that the linguocultural peculiarity of precedent statements highlights essential characteristics and linguocreative potential of verbal game representations as well as the sense-making and structure-forming functions of the verbal game. This article defines the verbal game as an intentional violation of the formal or meaningful canon of a precedent statement.

   The aim of the investigation is to detect and parameterize structural and semantic transformational capacities of precedent statements based on British mass-media discourse.

   The conducted research has led to the discovery of semantic transformations of precedent statements resulting in a denotational or significative change as well as structural transformations consisting of substitutions, reductions, additions and readjustments. Besides, we have found the non-linear character of the connection between structural and semantic shifts.

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