The subject of this research is the concept of "meme" in contemporary Russian media discourse, examined through the materials of federal and regional internet media. The focus is not on the internet meme as a multimodal digital object, but on the peculiarities of the linguistic representation of the concept of "meme" in media texts containing the relevant lexeme. The study aims to identify how this concept functions in the texts of mass media, what semantic components form its internal structure, and how they manifest in different types of media discourse. The research material consists of publications from the internet editions Gazeta.ru and Fontanka.ru, allowing for a comparison of the representation of the concept of "meme" in the all-Russian and regional media space. Thus, the subject of the study is related to the analysis of the structure, content, and ways of actualizing the concept of "meme" in contemporary media discourse. The study employs frame, contextual, and comparative analysis methods to uncover the structure of the concept of "meme," its linguistic representation features, and its specific functioning in federal and regional media texts. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that the concept of "meme" is considered not only as a phenomenon of internet communication but also as an independent concept of modern media discourse, represented in the texts of federal and regional media. The application of the frame approach to the comparative analysis of its representation in two types of media discourse is also novel. As a result of the study, it has been established that in modern media discourse, the meme serves not only as a unit of internet culture but also as a means of interpreting events, evaluating phenomena, and actualizing culturally recognizable images. The analysis showed that the concept of "meme" has a complex internal organization and is realized through a number of stable semantic components, which manifest in a generally similar way in federal and regional media, while also revealing specific differences in particular modes of representation. It is concluded that the meme in contemporary media functions as a significant concept of media discourse, reflecting the characteristics of the current linguistic and cultural worldview.
Shuyang Guan (Wed,) studied this question.