An Intertextual Exploration Into Chinese And English Food Advertisements

Intertextuality refers to the relationship between texts and is one of the basicfeatures of discourse. Since it was first put forward by Kristeva in the late1960s,intertextuality has received widespread attention and has been studied and employedextensively, especially in the field of literature criticism. In contrast, far less researchhas been conducted on intertextuality in discourse analysis, especially non-literarydiscourses, with advertising being one of them. Advertising discourse is quiteoutstanding for its employment of intertextuality owing to its communicative purpose,which requires it to convey more information in less time and be extremely inclusivein styles and genres. Research suggests that the studies of advertising have beencarried out from various perspectives while few have touched on its intertextuality, letalone the contrastive study of intertextuality in Chinese and English advertising.Therefore, the intertextual analysis of Chinese and English advertising discourse inthis thesis is of tremendous significance.The thesis adopts the theoretical framework of four types of intertextualities:specific, generic, media and cultural intertextuality, which is a combination of HanJinlong’s and Qiao Xinglan’s classifications. Through a qualitative and quantitativeanalysis of the data, the study is aimed at finding out the forms and functions ofintertextuality as well as the differences and similarities between intertextuality inChinese and English advertisements. To fulfill this purpose,100Chinese and100English food advertisements collected from China Advertising and Readers’ digest aswell as the websites are used for analysis.Analysis and discussion demonstrate that intertextuality plays an important rolein arousing customers’ interest and enhancing the memory value, the power ofpersuasion as well as the quality of artistry. Besides the revelation of the abovefunctions, the result also suggests that the specific techniques and distribution of thefour types of intertextuality in Chinese and English advertisements are basically the same except for cultural intertextuality. Cultural intertextuality differs in bothdistribution and techniques in the two kinds of advertisements owing to the differentcultural values of their targeted customers.The study not only offers a new perspective for non-literary discourse analysis,but also provides a new approach to the contrastive study of Chinese and Englishadvertisements. Besides, it also suggests that customers are able to obtain a betterunderstanding and appreciation of advertisements through intertextual analysis, andadmen can make better advertisements by taking intertextuality into account. Inaddition, the introduction of intertextuality into language teaching may help studentsbetter understand the relations between texts.It is sincerely hoped that this study will invoke further research and explorationof Chinese and English advertisements from the angle of intertextuality and otherperspectives.