From Citation To Plagiarism:A Critical Analysis Of Intertextuality In Academic Writings

The thesis aims to study the intertextual transformation process from citation to plagiarism in academic writings with the perspective of critical discourse analysis, regarding plagiarism in postgraduates’ writings as both a social and a discursive problem. Based on Fairclough’s interpretations and classifications of intertextuality, the thesis has systemically analyzed intertextual representations of citations in different forms and intertextual phenomena of plagiarism in the found cases.Three MA theses are selected for analysis from the China Master’s Theses Full-text Database(CMFD) on China National Knowledge Infrastructure(CNKI). They are chosen based on four criteria including the graduation year of 2014, the theses’ theme involving “Intertextuality”, the keyword with “Critical Discourse Analysis” and the discipline belonging to “Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics”. These criteria make sure that similar knowledge and information about the academic background are shared for the author to recognize intertextual representations regardless of the implicitness.Major findings can be concluded in two aspects. Firstly, in the analysis of citations, the implicitness and complications of intertextual representations, including intertextual markers, intertextual relations and intertextual modes, are found common in actual writings practices. As a result, deficient abilities of students to successfully control intertextuality should be considered on one hand; we should also notice the power held by students to take advantage of complex intertextual representations for creative meaning constructions. By mixing with authoritative sources to construct their own voices, students can gradually gain authority in the academic writing. However in this process, problems involving nonstandard behaviors or even plagiarism often happen because of the voicelessness of students writing, which brings about the second finding in this research. It is found that not all textual borrowings contain the possibility of plagiarism, and it happens only when intertextuality contains different forms of distortion and concealment so that the moved meaning has been misrepresented or hidden, leading to the result that other people’s efforts are constructed as the author’s own possessions. Both intertextual relations and intertextual modes are often found distorted or concealed in cases of plagiarism. Through discussions on “degraded” effects of problematic intertextual representations, students are found dependent on other MA theses to interpret authoritative works in indirect ways and deficient to construct their own voices in the balance of others’. As a result, these cases of plagiarism or “plagiarism-like” intertextuality reveal that in the connections to other literatures, meanings are represented in a false sense of individual voice, which instead results in rough or inadequate construction of creativity.The significance of the thesis lies in the detailed text analyses of academic intertextual citations and of their transgressive representations to observe plagiarism in actual and operable writings. As a kind of intertextuality, plagiarism involves problems of language more than those of morality. It reminds students to keep more emphasis on the construction of individual voices and to try to use intertextuality as a technical skill for creative writings.