Precedent phenomena as means of establishing attractiveness in polycode internet text

The article deals with the problem of precedent phenomena use for realization of the attractiveness effect. The role of traditional and innovative precedent phenomena (memes) in polycode internet media-text aimed at attracting attention of the audience to educational sites is under analysis. The material of the research is the content of Russian universities’ educational sites and their official pages in VKontakte. The method of discourse analysis of polycode internet media-text and the standard structural-and-semantic and functional-and-semantic method of transformed precedent text analysis are applied in the work. The findings are that creators use various models of semantic, lexical-and-semantic, structural and syntactic transformation of basic traditional precedent phenomena in polycode internet media texts including ironic reinterpretation, amphibolyand “literalization of initial content”. Internet-memes as instruments of attractiveness effect use some other semiotic mechanisms for attraction of the audience attention such as illogisms and visual blendings as well as different types of intertextual interaction. The author comes to a conclusion that precedent phenomena are of great perlocutive potential which allows to correlate basic cultural information in an initial precedent phenomenon with an actual one, meant by creator sense in transformed component. The results can be applied in optimization of the university site content.