A Contrastive Analysis Of Intertextuality In English News Headlines

Based on Saussure’s Sign System and Bakhtin’s Theory of Dialogism, Julia Kristeva, aFrench semiotician theorist, put forward the term“Intertextuality”in 1969. In her point ofview, any text is the absorption and transformation of other texts. Here“the other texts”means“intertext”, which could refer either to the works of the same age with the presentworks, or previous or later works; while“absorption”and“transformation”could be realizedeither through parody, citation, reference, and so on, or through readers’intertextual readingor analyzers’analysis. In the earlier time, it was limited to literary critique, but recently itreceives widespread attention in discourse analysis. In 1981, Beugrande and Dresslerintroduced intertextuality into text linguistics, which provides new theoretical perspective forlinguistic study of intertextuality. However, few research studies intertextuality in Englishnews headline. And a comparison between two kinds of newspaper is fewer. So this thesisdoes the investigation from this new perspective.Intertextuality is divided into specific intertextuality and genre intertextuality by XinBin. According to this classification, this thesis studies specific intertextuality of English newsheadline from the perspectives of citation, allusion, parody, and reference and analyzes howthese four aspects manifest specific intertextuality in English news headline; genreintertextuality is analyzed from the perspectives of structure and culture. Based on this, toanalyze the manifestation of intertextuality in China Daily and New York Times and make acontrast, this thesis chooses English news headlines in the first two pages of these twonewspapers in the first half year of 2011 to analyze its specific intertextuality and genreintertextuality.It is shown that both specific intertextuality and genre intertextuality are employed inChina Daily and New York Times, in which their frequencies are different. Throughcontrastive analysis, the final results are obtained. There are similarity and differencesbetween China Daily and New York Times in using intertextuality in news headline. The similarity is manifested mainly in the level of specific intertextuality. That is indirect reportedspeech is frequently used in both of these two kinds of newspaper. But the differences mainlyfocus on the level of genre intertextuality. In New York Times, syntactic level plays animportant role in the news headline; while it is lexical level plays an important role in thenews headline in China Daily.At last, this thesis summarizes the findings of this thesis, puts forward the limitationsand provides some suggestions for future study on intertextuality.