The phenomenon of precedence in Chamfort's "Maxims and anecdotes"

Chamfort's «Maxims and Anecdotes» contains texts belonging to several short-format speech genres. The genres are characterised by the compressed style of expression and special aesthetic emphasis of every element of the text. One of the means Chamfort used to achieve this effect is the precedent: quotations, titles of works, names of their authors and characters and etc. Precedent texts are means to achieve the aphoristic style and the expressive characterisation of a situation or a personage; they serve for implementation of communicative nature of speech genres, they are used as units of nomination, and also can be used for identification of the genre by the reader.