A Contrastive Study Of Generic Intertextuality On The Disputes Over South China Sea Between Chinese And American Media

In the past three decades,the research field of discourse genre has been expanded under the influence of many linguistic theories.Researchers in various fields began to pay more attention to the rhetorical and pragmatic functions of genre.As a hot topic in genre and intertextuality studies,generic intertextuality has been discussed from different perspectives.As an important language phenomenon,generic intertextuality provides an effective perspective for us to know the changes of genres,explore the sociality of genre and reveal the relationship between genre and social context.In recent years,generic intertextuality has attracted much attention in the field of literary genre analysis and critical discourse analysis,but most of the studies focus on the definition and description of generic intertextuality.Systematic interpretation of the theoretical level has not been obtained,and there are few discussions about the reasons for the use of generic intertextuality and the generative mechanism of generic intertextuality.Genre intertextuality is not a simple phenomenon of genre,which is not only the result of the development and change of social ideology,but also plays an indispensable role in promoting the emergence of new genre.Generic intertextuality refers to the mixing of different genres in a particular text,which is embodied in the blending of different styles,discourses and genres.Fairclough’s theory of critical discourse analysis,van Dijk’s cognitive context model,the agenda-setting theory provide solid theoretical basis for this study.On the basis of achievements of previous analyses,this study proposes a multi-dimensional framework for generic intertextuality analysis,including the static system of generic intertextuality and the dynamic process of generic intertextuality,which could deepen our understanding of the relationship between generic intertextuality and social reality.This study selects the typical topic of Sino-US crisis-disputes over the sovereignty of the South China Sea Islands,collecting news texts from May 2015 to December 2016 from People’s Daily and New York Times and rejecting those not closely related samples.After reading and screening,157 effective news reports are collected from People’s Daily.The total number of words is 258455,and the average number of words is 1646.150 news reports are collected from New York Times.The total number of words in English is 237047,and the average number of words is 1580.The difference is not enough to produce the error caused by the gaps between words and length.In view of this,this study analyzes the generic intertextuality from the system of generic intertextuality and the process of generic intertextuality,and tries to solve the following three questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences in the structures and types of the generic intertextuality in Chinese and American news reports on the disputes over South China Sea?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the identity relationships of generic intertextuality in Chinese and American news reports on the disputes over South China Sea?(3)What are the similarities and differences of intermediation of generic intertextuality in the reports of China and the United States on the disputes over South China Sea?What are the ideology and power reflected in the process of generic intertextuality?Both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed in this study to solve the above three problems,using Phython Jieba to conduct word segmentation of Chinese corpus,using Laurence Anthony’s Antconc and Log-likelyhood to do a comparative study on generic intertextuality in Chinese and American news reports.This dissertation probes into the similarities and differences in the exploitation of generic intertextual relations in Chinese and American newspapers.This study has got some valuable findings as follows:(1)Analysis of the distribution and features of generic intertextuality shows that People’s Daily attempts to set up a positive image of the Chinese government through argumentation discourse and narration discourse,and it tries to grasp the initiative in the Sino-American media’s "smokeless war of public opinion".On the other hand,New York Times reports have a strong sense of rationality,and uses the description and exposition discourse to explore the factors of interest and power behind the South China Sea disputes.In our research,New York Times has paid more attention to the proportion of the balance between different genres including description,narration,exposition,argumentation and instruction.In terms of the features of the genre intertextuality,New York Times is more complex and diverse than People’s Daily,which is in connection with the social and historical background and the means of news transmission from the two countries.(2)Analysis of the identity relationships of generic intertextuality probes into interpersonal meaning and subject position,respectively based on the theory of evaluation,the mode of discourse and the generic structure potential.The research result shows that People’s Daily and New York Times use a large amount of appreciation resources instead of emotional resources.Based on the qualitative analysis of attitude resources in both corpus,the dissertation concludes that People’s Daily is inclined to express support and trust interpersonal meaning,however New York Times’ reporters tend to express negative interpersonal meanings and exaggerate the conflicts between China and Philippines.On the other hand,generic intertextuality in these newspapers makes the author’s authoritative status change constantly,sometimes becoming a non-power person close to the reader and equal to the readers.This study finds that the identities in New York Times are more complex and changeable than People’s Daily,including news narrator,evaluators,participants of social actors,an interlocutor in discussion,and ecological maintainer,etc.The transformation process of the subject position and reading position also reflects the blending of the description,narration,interpretation,argumentation,and explanation genres.(3)Analysis of genre on the social level examines the discourse practice and discourse order in a specific society,so as to reveal the features and effects of generic transformation.The result shows that in order to highlight the rationality of their views,People’s Daily focus less on different themes and fields,but pays close attention on its historical and current contents.Reporters prefer to use political and historical themes to introduce the history of the south China sea disputes and the status quo.However,large amounts of reports in New York Times form a complicated relationship of thematic intertextuality with reports from People’s Daily,which gives rise to tit-for-tat communication effect.From the perspective of the social-cognitive perspective,the essence is to explain the interaction and game between different genres.These results reveal how the Chinese media choose different genres to construct the core concept of the sovereignty over South China sea.In addition,this research is helpful in gaining insight into how American media deconstructs and reconstructs the concepts so as to control the dominant power of international public opinion.This study has attempted to work out an analytical model of generic intertextuality on the disputes over South China Sea,so as to shed some light both on the theory of generic intertextuality and on its practical analysis.We have made some progress in the following aspects:First,the study has drawn on integrated insights from several fields of study including Bakhtin’s theory,critical discourse analysis,communication study,in order to explore the dynamic process and pragmatic effect of generic intertextuality.Our way of analysis serves not only to disclose the hidden meaning and power relations in and behind media discourse but also to show a trend of methodological integration between or among linguistics and other humanities.Second,the materials selected in this study are all authentic to which we have applied both corpus technology and Chinese word segmentation technology in order to achieve a fairly convincing analysis of generic intertextuality in Chinese and English newspapers.We intend this study to be another attempt at a fruitful combination of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics.Third,this study also intends to provide some useful and multidimensional ideas both for ordinary readers and journalistic practitioners to understand the genre structures and discourse strategies of Chinese and American news discourses.It is of great practical significance to strengthen China’s foreign media discourse strategy and its ability for use.