A Pragmatic Contrastive Study On The Intertextuality In Literature Review Of Chinese And American Literary Theses

Intertextuality refers to the phenomenon that any discourses contain quotations or segments from other texts.Since the concept was put forward,studies have been conducted mainly from structural to deconstructional perspectives.Taking Cooperative Principle as theoretical framework of intertextuality,the literature review of Chinese and American literary theses as study object,using the method of corpus helped by the tool of Wmatirx,this thesis makes a contrast of the distribution of reporting verbs,intertextual forms,thus revealing functions from the speech acts as well as the underlying cross-cultural values based on the maxims of quality,quantity,etc.The major findings can be listed as follows:(1)As for the distribution of reporting verbs,there are 50 and 52 types used in Chinese and American corpora respectively.In terms of the polarity,both Chinese and American corpora have a similar percentage of positive verbs;in terms of the use of negative verbs,American corpus accounts for an obvious higher percentage than that in Chinese corpus;in terms of the use of neutral verbs,Chinese corpus accounts for an obvious higher percentage than that in American corpus.The types and distribution of intertextual forms can be summarized through reporting verbs.From the distribution of intertextual forms,the most frequently used intertextual forms in Chinese and American corpora are narrative report of speech act,narrative report of thought act and mention,and both corpora have a lower percentage of free indirect speech.In terms of the differences of the distribution of intertextual forms,Chinese corpus uses more narrative report of thought act,direct speech and mention of people while American corpus has a preference for the narrative report of speech act,indirect speech and mention of text.(2)The similarities and differences of intertextuality reflect the pragmatic functions in Cooperative Principle.Based on the four maxims,the use of mention,direct speech and free direct speech in both corpora obey the maxim of quality and manner,improving the clarity and credibility to avoid the responsibility for academic disputes.In contrast,indirect speech and free indirect speech violate the maxim of quality by adding author?s emotions and attitudes to the reported contents.Narrative report of speech act and narrative report of thought act violate the maxim of manner,expressing the author?s viewpoint in a more indirect way,thus negotiating relationship with readers.From the perspective of information source,compared with mention of people and narrative report of thought act used frequently in Chinese corpus,mention of text and narrative report of speech act in American corpus are more objective and credible,avoiding responsibility for academic disputes.(3)Extending research object from text to cultural context form a broad perspective of intertextuality.From the perspective of cross-cultural pragmatics,the pragmatic similarities and differences in Cooperative Principle can disclose the cultural values in China and America.Chinese culture tends to be of balance between femininity and masculinity because of the higher percentage of neutral verbs while American culture tends to be of masculinity because of the higher percentage of negative verbs which indicate competition;Chinese culture is characterized by higher power distance in academy,more collectivism and higher uncertainty avoidance due to the higher percentage of direct speech while American culture is inclined to have lower power distance in academy,more individualism and lower uncertainty avoidance due to the higher percentage of indirect speech.With the help of the pragmatic classification of intertextuality and corpus tool,the attributes of being more objective and operational are added to the present study,which exert some enlightening significance to Chinese students? academic writing.