Abstract: The article is devoted to the study of the meme as a genre of academic discourse. The subject of the study is the category of precedence as presented in a meme of academic discourse in Russian. A meme is a genre of internet communication realized as a polycode text, the visual element of which is an image or photograph enclosed in a frame, and the verbal element is a caption accompanying the image. The minimalism of form and the author’s expressiveness, inherent in the genre, rely on meaning compression strategies such as the inclusion of precedent phenomena at both the visual and verbal levels of the polycode text. The relevance of the study stems from the fact that the Internet meme is socially significant as a genre: it participates in shaping public opinion through emotional impact on the audience and rapid dissemination, while also serving as a custodian of the cultural codes of online communities and other social groups. The study was conducted on a corpus of 100 memes in Russian, selected by continuous sampling from the Internet and thematically related to academic discourse. The novelty of the study lies in the comprehensive examination of academic discourse texts. Memes of this type serve as vehicles of cultural transmission: they convey ideas about what it means to get higher education, articulate the positions of participants, reflect the experiences and interaction dynamics of those engaged in academic discourse, and reveal societal attitudes toward higher education at large. The study demonstrated that meme precedence, a key mechanism for compressing meaning and a foundation of authorial creativity, is realized through both original and transformed precedent texts. These precedent phenomena operate on verbal and visual levels and, in terms of their reproducibility, can be categorized as either fully reproduced or partially reproduced in meaning.

Keywords: polycode text, Internet meme, academic discourse, precedent phenomenon, verbal component, visual component, Internet communication, student, Russian language, teacher