A Study On Intertextuality In Chinese Festival Blessing Short Messages

The first short message (SM) in the world was successfully sent in December1992in theUK. Seven year later SM started to spread all around the world and lead a new round oftechnology revolution. After China Mobile and China Unicom started the SM service in2000,SM began to spread over China and become popular among the public in a lightening speed.It has made up for the deficiency of the traditional media with its characteristics of spreadingconveniently at fast speed and low cost and become a very important channel and carrier ofeveryday information and communication. People are all fond of sending and receiving SM indaily life, especially on festivals. To make the Chinese Festival Blessing SM popular and sendto more people, writers adopt different strategies. Intertextuality is an effective technique mostof them prefer.The term "intertextuality" was first put forward by the French semiotician Julia Kristevain1966. She argues each text can be seen as intertext, which refers to a text between othertexts. Each text can’t exist alone. Both the existence and understanding of a signal test havesome connection with other texts. Intertextuality is kind of relationship that texts areinterpenetrated and interwoven with each other. Every text is an absorption andtransformation of other texts. Since then, intertextuality has become a hot topic in the literarywork and non-literary works as well. As a specific text, SM has a very typical feature ofintertextuality and has a very wide research space, which is worth a further exploration.However, most of the previous researches focus on the function and classifications ofintertextuality in SM. Only a few researches have been done on the generating mechanism ofintertextuality. The present study intends to present a relatively detailed and systematicanalysis of intertextuality in Chinese festival blessing SM from the perspective of memetics. Memetics is a new theory based on Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, which has a greatexplanatory power of culture. The core term of memetics is meme. In1976, Richard Dawkins,a British evolutionary biologist, first proposed the term “meme” after the word “gene” in hisbook The selfish gene to explain the spread of idea and cultural phenomena. He thinks memeis a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation. A meme can be an idea, a tune, abuzzword, fashion clothes or even an action. It can be transmitted from one mind to anotherthrough writing, speech, gestures, facial expression or other imitable phenomena. RichardDawkins’ student Susan Blackmore (1999:66) thinks that any information can be calledmeme if it is replicated through imitation in abroad sense. MT can help us to discover the lawof cultural transmission. Intertextuality is realized through a text assimilating, reorganizing orrearranging certain part of another text, which is a meme or several memes. In China,Professor Xu Shenghuan (徐盛桓,2005) firstly employs memetics to analyze intertextualityin the literary works, which proves the powerful explanation of culture. Based on XuShenghuan’s research, we can adapt memetics to analyze intertextuality in other texts, forexample the non-literary works.Through the analysis of some festival short messages, the author will analyze howmemes help to realize intertextuality in the Chinese Festival Blessing SM. The study will notonly help us have a better understanding of intertextuality in the Chinese Festival BlessingSM, but also help the users master the skills of intertextuality to create better SM, and toimprove the quality of SM to realize effective communication.There are five parts in this thesis:Chapter One makes a brief introduction of the research objectives and significance,research questions, and research methodology. Meanwhile, the organization of the thesis willbe briefly stated.Chapter Two is the literature review. The author will review the previous studies on intertextuality and SM. Meanwhile, the previous studies of intertextuality in SM will also bepresented.Chapter Three establishes the theoretical framework of the present study based onmemetic theory including the origin, definition and some relative terms of the memetics.Furthermore, it analyzes the relationship between meme and language which raises theinterrelationship between memes and intertextuality. The last part of this chapter is thetheoretical framework based on the interrelation between memes and intertextuality.Chapter Four is the memetic study on intertextuality in Chinese Festival Blessing SM. Itanalyzes the realization process of intertextuality with the typical Chinese Festival BlessingSMs based on the constructed theoretical framework in the last chapter and tries to point outthat the generative mechanism of intertextuality is the replication of memes.The last chapter will wrap up with the main findings based on the discussions andanalyses in the previous chapters. Besides, limitations of the present thesis will be pointed outand further studies in this realm will be suggested and encouraged.