Chinese Rock And Roll As Recontextualized Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective

Based on the Transtextuality Theory proposed by Pennycook and corpus and systemic functional grammar, this paper aims to analyze the process of the recontextualization of Chinese rock and roll from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. By corpus analysis, the bird’s-eye view linguistic features of Chinese rock and roll and its differences and similarities in each phase are described. By systemic functional grammar analysis, the cluster of high frequent lexical word “爱/love” and the clauses with the keyword “梦/dream” and lyrics present the different styles between western and Chinese rock and roll. These analyses both in the macro level and in the micro level point to the discursive features of Chinese rock and roll in the process of recontextualization with the influence of Chinese social discourses.Data are the C hinese rock and roll lyrics ranging from the year 1986 to 2013. In this research, the development of C hinese rock and roll is firstly divided into three phases, involving the prosperity time, the transformation time and the developing time. Then 100 lyrics written by at least 12 songwriters in each phase will be chosen. In order to keep the authentitcity and accuracy of the linguistic materials, most of these lyrics source from the singers’ personal albums, works and webpages.It is found that on the one hand C hinese rock and roll performs the rebelling consciousness in terms of lexical choice, but on the other accompanying with social change, the essence of lyrics reflects the individual’s helplessness and confusion, spiritual emptiness and the pursuit of self-development. The songwriters, by hybriding the music discourse and political discourse, aim to express their ideas and appraise the politics. The intertextual analysis reveals the songwriter’s concession.The significance of the study is that the C hinese rock and roll songwriters do not have chances to participate in the social activities and the development of C hinese rock and roll doesn’t undergo the turbulent time or warfare. Then the Chinese rock and roll singers and the songwriters may not have the strong rebelling spirit. They just inherit the western rock and roll form. Besides, the hybridity of political discourse and music discourse presents the songwriters’ attitude towards the politics, which hardly takes effects on social change and political development.