A Study Of Intertextuality In English Web Sports News Headlines From The Perspective Of Memetics

Many scholars at home and abroad regard intertextuality as the research object and apply it to the intertextuality research of literary criticism.But most studies just give a brief introduction about the theory of the intertextuality from different stances,such as,connotation,features and types.Fewer researchers explore the motivation and generative mechanism of it.The emergence and development of memetics have provided a new perspective to solve this problem.Xu Shenghuan applied memetics to the analysis of texts' intertextuality in the literary field and confirmed the feasibility of such research.Based on the studies,intertextuality can be researched not only in the literary field but also in the non-literary field.This paper attempts to analyze the intertextuality of non-literary texts like English sports news headlines from the perspective of memetics and aims to further clarify that the formation of intertextuality originates from meme replication,and at the same time,to analyze the pragmatic functions of intertextuality from the perspective of memetics in the specific English web sports news headlines.Based on Xin Bin's classification of intertextuality and He Ziran's interpretation of the ways of meme replication,the paper constructs a conceptual framework for analyzing English web sports news headlines.And in order to have better interpretation of the replicating and spreading process of intertextuality and to prove the explanatory power and applicability of the conceptual framework,this paper mainly employs the qualitative research methods through the combination of brief theoretical introduction and detailed examples to analyze the English web sports news headline in detail.The research of this paper further manifests the generative mechanism of intertextuality that the formation of intertextuality is the result of meme selection,replication,transmission and variation,which is a constant and dynamic process;and this hypothesis can also be used innon-literary field.In the study,it is found that the most frequently used intertextual approaches in web news headlines are quotation,parody,allusion,and at the same time,strong memes like this idiomatic expression are most favored in English web sports news headlines.Besides,the realization of pragmatic functions in sports news headlines is the final purpose by connecting memetics and intertextuality..It is a new perspective to make a further study of the mechanism and principle of the formation of intertextuality from the view of memetics.This research can provide reference for other researchers to employ memetics for the study of intertextuality in the non-literary field,such as web news headlines.It is also helpful for the news editor to expand the angles in the process of editing web sports headlines.