A Study On Chinese Traditional Intertextuality

This dissertation deals with Chinese traditional intertextuality, aiming at establishing an explanatory theory for it by taking perspectives provided by modern linguistic and modern textual theories, and focusing on types of interaction, cognitive mechanism, hierarchy and marker of traditional intertextuality. And this dissertation also expects to enable dialogue between Chinese and western academia on intertextuality and reveal the magnificent textual world in Chinese traditional intertextuality.Chapter One is the introduction of the dissertation. Most researchers take Chinese traditional intertextuality merely a figure of speech and there is no space for dialogue between Chinese and western intertextuality, which arouses our interest of further discussion. In this dissertation, the language phenomena falling into the scope of traditional intertexuality include those referred to by terms "HuX"(�'X), in which " huwen"(�'文) is the most familiar one, and the "HuX" terms are divided into two groups:overall intertextuality label and explanatory intertextuality label. And the previous researches on traditional intertextuality lacks systemical theory summaries and limit to discussions of intertextuality as a figure of speech. In addition, we summarize the origin and evolution of western intertextuality theory and its dissemination in China in the last three decades.Chapter two discusses the origin of traditional intertextuality. By centering the disputes among scholars over the appearance of term "huwen", we prove that it was first introduced by ZhengXuan (郑玄), and the figure of speech intertextuality was also first discovered by him. We study exhaustively the term "huwen" used by Zhengxuan, founder of traditional intertextuality, and conclude that Zhengxuan’s "huwen" was used not only to refer to language phenomena of rhetorical intertextuality, and the hierarchy of intertextual items exist not only in the present text. And the history of traditional intertextuality theory is made of three periods: infancy(late Han dynasty to Wei and Jin dynasties),awareness(Tang dynasty) and summing up (late Qing dynasty to modern times)Chapter three presents a systematic study of the interaction of intertextual items in traditional intertextuality. We divide the traditional intertextuality into three major types:intertextuality of formal interactivity (formal rhyme intertextuality), intertextuality of semantic interactivity (including semantic similarity, semantic conflict, semantic complementation and semantic reference), intertextuality of formal-semantic interactivity(including formal abbreviation-semantic reciprocity and formal abbreviation-semantic complementation). And the rhetorical intertextuality, most well known by the academic world, is just one type of intertextuality of formal abbreviation-semantic complementation. We also summarize two principles of cognitive mechanism of traditional intertextuality:"similarity is inter-textuality" and "complementation is intertextuality".Chapter four analyses the connotation, hierarchy and marker of "Wen"(文)in traditional intertextuality. The original meaning of "Wen" is tattoo, and its extended meaning is cross lines. The ancient people have an open concept of’Wen",they considered that intersection of everything could produce text. The hierarchy of "Wen" in ancient China reflects a strong thought of continuum, from something as small as single characters to that as big as the entire text, so any language constructions which have independent meaning are liable to be considered as "Wen". Thus traditional intertextuality does not concentrate on inter-textual or trans-textual ones, but tries to reveal the relationships of "Wen" in different levels. Hence there are types with Chinese distinctives in traditional intertextuality, such as Shizhang intertextuality(诗章�'文),Zhuan-Zan intertextuality(传赞�'文)Jing-Zhuan intertextuality (经传�'文)Jing-Xu intertextuality (经序�'文),Pianming intertextuality (篇名�'文).And numerous markers of these types in traditional intertextuality are observed in this chaper.Chapter five aims to bring about a thorough dialogue between Chinese and western intertextuality based on studies above. We point out here that Chinese intertextuality has something in common with western intertextuality on the original meaning of "Wen"(文), with respect to that there is a strong notion of mutuality in understanding "Wen"(文) both in ancient Chinese thought and western intertextuality theory. And the common research subjects (trans-textual intertextuality and subsidiary textual intertextuality) enable direct dialogue between Chinese and western intertextuality. We compare the cognitive mechanism of Chinese and western intertextuality, summarizing western one as "embedding is intertextuality", including "formally embedding is intertextuality" and "associationally embedding is intertextuality". And there are some kinds of intertextuality caused by formally embedding in the Chinese traditional ones too. The two principles of cognitive mechanism of Chinese traditional intertextuality," Being similar is intertextuality " and" Being complementary is intertextuality", could be regarded as the Chinese version of the western associational and embedding principles.Through analyzing "Jing-Zhuan intertextuality’‘(经传�'文)ind "Jing-Xu intertextuality’‘(经序�'文),we probe into the relative independence of subsidiary text and discourse rights of main and subsidiary texts. And we also study the textual world constructed by traditional subsidiary text, pointing out that subsidiary text in traditional annotation books has a duality of metatextual text and subsidiary text, and because of the existence of subsidiary text, the inter-text which has relation of intertextuality with current main text has duality of source text and front-text. And the traditional subsidiary text has a basic function(interpretive function) and five additional functions(testifying, supplement, proofreading, analyzing and convergence), whose mingling leads to derivation of very rich patters. Then we discuss some intertextual phenomena what are interlinked with western intertextuality theory, in order to push forward the dialogue between Chinese and western intertextuality to a wider field.Chapter six is the conclusion. It sums up the whole dissertation.