A Text Linguistic Approach To Intertextuality

Intertextuality is a term coined by the French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late 1960s. Since then, intertextuality has become one of the most important key words of literary theory and cultural studies and also one of the central research issues in these fields. Over the past twenty years, linguists have embraced Bakhtin's dialogism and extended the study of intertextuality beyond the literary domain. In 1981, Beaugrande and Dressier brought the notion of intertextuality into text linguistics - the study of how people manage to communicate via texts. They defined intertextuality as the "ways in which the production and reception of a given text depends upon the participants' knowledge of other texts" (182) and treated it as one of the seven standards of textuality that a text must meet, which provided new theoretical perspectives for linguistic studies of intertextuality. However, not much attention has been devoted to intertextuality in text linguistic research. From literature review, we can see that a lot of research has been done in many different fields. But not much research has been conducted on intertextuality within the theoretical framework of text linguistics. This is why we venture into this field.Within the theoretical framework of text linguistics, and mainly in light of the constitutive principles of textual communication and the theory of dialogism, this dissertation approaches intertextuality from the perspectives of shared knowledge and intertextual cues, intertextuality and genre, intertextuality and evaluation, and textual functions of intertextuality, attempting to reveal its linguistic, social, evaluative, and cognitive dimensions which are represented in the text, and to demonstrate that intertextuality is not simply the semantic relationship formed between texts and other texts but an interactive process that has linguistic, social, evaluative and cognitive dimensions. We hope that this study will broaden our current understanding of intertextuality, open up new possibilities for intertextuality research, and make a moderate contribution to the building of theories of intertextuality as well as text and discourse studies.This dissertation consists of eight chapters.