Critical Discourse Analysis Of Intertextuality In News Discourse

In an era of globalization,major public emergencies arouse wide concern in the international community.The COVID-19 pandemic has become the most disruptive global event and the greatest challenge of humankind since World War II.Its relevant developments are closely related to health and safety of all.Plenty of coverage on the pandemic,including the China-related,has been made by overseas media.Intertextuality,a term first coined by the French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the1980 s,means that any text is organized and woven out of other texts.In recent years the theory has been extensively studied by scholars of Critical Discourse Analysis,and widely applied to analysis of non-literary works,especially news discourse.The main purpose of intertextuality in CDA is to reveal the relationships between language,power and ideology.This thesis conducts critical discourse analysis of intertextuality in news discourse,in order to find out the hidden values and ideologies.20 news reports on COVID-19 in China from The New York Times are selected as the corpus data.Based on Xin Bin’s classification of intertextuality,the following questions are to be answered: 1)How are the features of specific and generic intertextuality manifested in these news reports? 2)What kinds of ideologies are implied by intertextuality in these news discourses? 3)What are the possible factors contributing to the news discourse construction?According to the research findings,there is a wide distribution of specific intertextuality and generic intertextuality features in news discourses.Reporters tend to employ various intertextual skills to implicitly convey their views and attitudes.Although there are some objective statements of the outbreak and China’s prevention and control efforts,the ideologies implied by the features of intertextuality,as a whole,are biased and tendentious.There are even contents distorting facts and smearing China’s image.Therefore,the Chinese readers should raise their critical awareness and take a dialectical and comprehensive view of such reports.