Intertextuality In Chinese Festival Blessing Short Messages

This thesis explores intertextuality in Chinese festival blessing short messages (SM). It provides a systematic analysis of the intertextual relationships in the SMs, and explains the reasons for the employment of intertextuality from the perspective of Verschueren's (2000) Linguistic Adaptation Theory (LAT). It adopts a qualitative research method based on the naturally occurring data.Considering the language features of Chinese festival blessing SMs, this thesis gives a slight modification to the typology of intertextuality proposed by Hatim & Mason (Hatim & Mason, 1990: 132) and sorts out ten categories of intertextuality, including six types of manifest intertextuality, namely, parody, allusion, quotation, code-switching, proverb and embedding, and four types of constitutive intertextuality, namely, generic intertextuality, stylistic intertextuality, structural intertextuality, and functional intertextuality. On the basis of analyzing the collected data, the present study discusses the reasons for the SM users'choice-makings of intertextuality. Focusing on the communicative context, the study finds that these choice-makings are the results of adaptation to such contexts as the mental world which includes the willingness to transfer good wishes and draw close the interpersonal relationship, the desire for happiness and relaxation, the mentality of game and mischief, the open state of mind in the modern society and the intention to pursue novelty; the social world which includes the traditional and popular culture, the trend of commerce penetration and globalization; and the physical world which involves the character limit and space constraint of SMs.The whole thesis is made up of six chapters. Chapter One is the introduction, introducing the research rationale, principles of data collection, research method, and research questions of the present study. Chapter Two is the literature review, providing a brief review on the development of the theories of intertextuality, the classifications of intertextuality, and the previous studies on SMs. Chapter Three gives the theoretical framework for the present study based on the Linguistic Adaptation Theory (Verschueren, 2000). Chapter Four and Five are the major part of the study, in which I made a systematic analysis on the intertextual relationships in Chinese festival blessing SMs and explored the pragmatic reasons for the employment of intertextuality. Chapter Six is the conclusion, summarizing the major findings and limitations for the present study, and making some suggestions for further studies.It is hoped that through the study on intertextuality in Chinese festival blessing SMs, the present research can shed some light on the understanding of this phenomenon and the theories about it, and also helps better understand the employment of intertextuality in SMs.