A Comparative Study Of Intertextuality In News Reports On Resuming Business During The COVID-19 Outbreak

In the context of the outbreak of Corona Virus Disease 2019(hereinafter referred to as COVID-19)in 2020,“resumption of work” has become a hot topic for all.The author collected news articles from February 2020 to August 2020 from People’s Daily and The Washington Post on the resumption of work and separately screened 70 pieces of effective news reports from the two newspapers as the research corpus.Based on the classification criteria of specific intertextuality and genre intertextuality proposed by Xin Bin,the article uses a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis to conduct an intertextual comparative analysis.In recent years,domestic and foreign researches on the intertextuality of news discourses mainly focus on the ideology of the text.Few studies have compared the intertextuality of Chinese news discourses and English news discourses.Based on the specific classification criteria of intertextuality and genre intertextuality proposed by professor Xin Bin,the author put forward three research questions.Firstly,what are the similarities and differences regarding specific intertextuality in news reports on resuming business between People’s Daily and The Washington Post? Secondly,what are the similarities and differences regarding generic intertextuality in news reports on resuming business between People’s Daily and The Washington Post?Thirdly,what pragmatic functions do these intertextuality features perform in People’s Daily and The Washington Post? The author mainly analyzes People’s Daily and The Washington Post from the perspective of reporting verbs,news sources and mixture of genre,and further discuss the pragmatic functions that the intertextuality features perform in People’s Daily and The Washington Post.The study found that specific intertextuality and genre intertextuality are reflected in People’s Daily and The Washington Post.In terms of specific intertextuality,most of the reporting discourse has a clear source of information.However,there are also differences between the two.People’s Daily prefers to quote the words of government institutions,while The Washington Post is more inclined to quote the words of experts,scholars and ordinary people,and use more reporting verbs in news reports.In terms of genre intertextuality,People’s Daily and The Washington Post are consistent in “genre integration”.News reporters often blend genres such as narration,argumentation,and explanation together,resulting in integration of genres.And in the aspect of pragmatic functions,the intertextuality features that reflected in the news reports serve to increase the credibility of the reports and also convey the reporters’ own intention.On one hand,this study has a certain guiding significance for revealing the intertextuality in news discourse,especially for the comparative study of the intertextuality of business news discourse.On the other hand,for journalists,the study can provide some reference for the writing of news reports,so that they can effectively use intertextual means for news reports;for news readers,understanding the differences in intertextuality between different language carriers at home and abroad helps to enhance their analytical awareness of news texts and enable them to read news texts critically rather than passively accepting information from the media.