Nowadays, studies on communication within professional discourse have become topical; the changes in the contemporary professional texts under the influence of multimedia and information technologies demand introduction of relevant methods of textual analysis. The article addresses such issues as information structure of popular scientific and technical texts, their hierarchical organization, and the problems of decoding of meaning at different levels during information processing. To establish the theoretical framework of the research, cognitive, semantic and pragmatic analyses of lexical units were performed to examine how new methods of encoding, transferring and decoding of meaning at different levels affect contemporary professional communication.