A Study Of The Precedent Phenomenon In Headlines Of The Mass Media

News headline is of vital importance to mass media. It not only conveys the most important facts and viewpoints to the readers, but also assumes the mission to attract the readers with humorously witty and in-depth language in vivid and graceful styles. A headline with great originality can light up the whole article and impress the readers significantly.Therefore, the quality of a headline determines, in a sense, whether an article is successful or not, which should not be taken lightly. Based on descriptions and summaries of many previous studies, the author of the current thesis analyzes and interprets various linguistic examples, aiming to give an all-round study of the precedent phenomenon which is widely found in news headlines in the mass media field, with a view to provide new perspectives and implications to Russian linguistic studies and Russian journalistic studies.The thesis uses the method of classification description and text analysis, relying on lexicology, linguistics and other related theories, on the basis of a large number of corpuses and instances, a comprehensive analysis, explanation of the "precedent text" and practice of analytical induction, provides detailed corpuses for the research of the "precedent text" phenomenon. It has certain reference value on the phenomenon of precedent text for the future in-depth study, and also provides a good perspective and breakthrough point for Russian linguistics research. The instances I analysis are selected from the titles of Russian mainstream media from 2013 to 2015: The Independent Newspaper, The Merchant Newspaper, The Komsomolskaya Pravda Newspaper, Evidence And Fact, The News of the Moscow, The Russian Newspaper, The Communist Youth League in Moscow Newspaper, The Moscow Pravda, Argument, Pravda (online edition), The Newspaper Net, The Lateral and so on.The innovation of this thesis lies in:the first, it has academic view on the precedent phenomenon of Russian mass media headlines; the second, it combs the precedent text function in the mass media systematically, and makes the The classification and statistics of headlines in 2013-2015 Russian mainstream media combined with large numbers of language instances.The current thesis is composed of four parts, namely the introduction part, the main body, the conclusion part and the references.The introduction part reviews the practical significance of studying precedent texts and elucidates the subjects, the objectives, the major tasks and the innovation of the present study, as well as the theoretical foundations of the study.The first chapter introduces the theoretical system of studying news headlines, with a comprehensive description of the concept, the functions, the features, the study perspectives of headlines, and clarifies the specific categories of headlines in linguistics.In the second chapter, the author gives a detailed elaboration of precedent texts, with the focus on the concept of precedent texts and the functions of precedent texts in mess media. Precedent texts mainly exert functions such as naming, evaluation, emphasis, modification, stylization, symbolization, appealing, qualification, cognition, etc.In the third chapter, the author categorizes the sources of precedent texts in headlines of mass media first, and then explicates and analyzes the rationale of precedent texts. Precedent texts can be found in various forms. The linguistic materials collected by the author show that the sources of precedent texts could be categorized as follows:1) titles of literary works, classic words in them and the heroes as well as heroines in those works; 2) names of film and television works, expressions in and leading characters of those works; 3) titles of music and works of art; 4) advertisements; 5) folk creations; 6) idiomatic expressions; 7) religion-related texts-famous aphorism, biblical quotations and characters in the Bible; 8) political slogans in different times; 9) historical events and famous remarks and figures related to those events.In the conclusion part, the author reviews and summarizes the thesis and proposes that the "precedent text" phenomenon is still a hot area of study, which combines disciplines such as linguistics, literature and journalism organically, posing to contribute a lot to deepening interdisciplinary studies both theoretically and practically. The use of precedent texts in news headlines draws closer the writers of the texts and the receivers, providing great guidance for the readers to understand and accept the texts. During the study, the author analyzes and explicates the rationale of precedent texts in a comprehensive way with rich linguistic materials and examples and comes up with a rational conclusion:precedent texts derive from various sources, and the most frequently used ones are from literary sources (literary works, dramas, fables, fairy tales, poetics, essays, etc.), film and TV sources (film titles and scripts), and idiomatic expressions (proverbs, famous aphorism, historic tales, dialects and slangs, etc.). The current study boasts comprehensively-covered examples, enriching the studies of precedent texts with various and detailed linguistic materials, which can shed some light on future studies of precedent texts and provide a good perspective and cut-in point for Russian linguistic studies.