A Study On Intertextuality Of The Chinese Microblog Discourse

The intertextual theory was first proposed by Julia Kristeva, one famous French Semiotician, in the late 1960s, when she tried to explain Bakhtin's theory of Dialogism. According to Kristeva, any text is formed as a mosaic of quotations and any text is the absorption and transformation of another text.[28] Since then, it has become one of the hottest research topic in literary field and discourse analysis. But we must admit that not much research has been done on the comprehensive intertextual relations of discourses. Besides, no research has studied the intertextuality in the Chinese microblog discourse, so this thesis tries to fill in this gap by analyzing the intertextual patterns in microblog discourse and explore the pragmatic functions of intertextuality.The microblog offers users a platform of information communication where they can publish texts, upload photos and share videos etc.. The users become active reporters instead of passive listeners. They can retweet their favorite microblog or comment on a tweet. Tweet is an electronic document which is published in the microblog by the users, the content people can send is limited in 140 characters. As the development of the high technology, the microblog in China develops rapidly. The users boomed in the year of 2010, with visitors doubled and time spent on it tripled. Sina microblog, as the biggest web portal, alone has more than 200 million microbloggers. The influence of microblog is extending gradually.This study selects 147 hot retweets from the Sina Weibo as our object of research and adopts a theoretical framework based on Xin Bin's specific intertextuality and generic intertextuality. In the analysis of specific intertextuality, we study the realizations of six intertextual patterns in the hot retweets. They are reference, cliche, parody, conventionalism, proverb and idiom, and literary allusion. In the analysis of generic intertextuality, we analyze the mixture of genres and the mixture of discourse modals. We find that most of hot retweets in Sina Weibo are the mixture of argumentative and descriptive genres or argumentative genre. People prefer to focus on the tweets with comments on some hot issues. And some tweets are uploaded with pictures, Videos and links. These mixtures of modals also make the tweets high retweeted and appealing. By using these intertextual strategies, the users can realize the pragmatic functions of informing, emotional appealing and persuading. The aim of the study is 1) to illustrate the specific intextextual patterns of microblog discourse; 2) to explore the generic intertextual features of microblog discourse; 3) to expound the pragmatic functions of intertextuality in microblog discourse. And we hope our exploration can shed light on the further researches on the intertextual study of the microblog discourse.