COGNITIVE-LINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION OF PRECEDENT TEXTS IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

This article examines the cognitive-linguistic mechanisms underlying the representation and functioning of precedent texts in English and Uzbek media discourse. Precedent texts together with precedent names, statements, and situations are treated as a media-specific subtype of intertextuality whose interpretation depends on frame activation, conceptual metaphor, and conceptual blending operating under the acute spatial and temporal constraints of journalistic genres, above all the news headline. Combining the theory of precedent phenomena with cognitive linguistics and critical media-discourse analysis, the study analyzes a corpus of English and Uzbek news headlines and opinion pieces containing precedent-text markers. The results show that media discourse imposes a distinct cognitive regime on precedent-text processing compression, structural transformation (“play” on a canonical form), and rapid re-mapping of a precedent frame onto a current news event that is largely absent from literary discourse. Comparatively, English media draws on a relatively stable Anglo-American and Western cognitive base (political rhetoric, film and popular culture, residual Biblical and Shakespearean idiom), while Uzbek media operates with a more heterogeneous, layered cognitive base combining the classical Eastern literary-Islamic heritage, a still partly active Soviet-era precedent stratum, and a rapidly expanding globalized stratum absorbed through translated international news and digital media. These findings extend cognitive-linguistic and precedent-phenomena theory to comparative English–Uzbek media discourse and carry direct implications for media literacy and critical discourse analysis.