A Critical Analysis Of Generic Intertextuality In News Discourse

"Intertextuality" means that a text is a combination of other text fragments or words of others,and generic intertextuality refers to the mixture of different genres,registers or styles in a text.Genre,under the context of culture,is a kind of communicating events through which members of a speech community accomplish certain goals,and register is the specific language realization of genre in a given context of situation.This thesis,taking nine reports from American news media on China's military parade on September 3rd in 2015 as data,conducts a critical analysis of generic intertextuality in news discourse.Based on Fairclough's Three-dimensional Framework and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar,the thesis intends to study the two questions:(1)How is intertextuality demonstrated in context of situation?(2)What pragmatic functions are realized through generic intertextuality in context of culture?The study on American media's news reports finds that intertextuality in context of situation is realized through the mixture in field of discourse and tenor of discourse.In terms of ideational meaning,text generators mainly adopt material process and relational process to describe and evaluate Chinese military parade,and also change the subject matters,which enables voices from others to co-exist with the target one.In terms of interpersonal meaning,reported speeches from various sources may not only enhance the objectivity of the news reports but also increase their authoritativeness.In terms of textual meaning,intertextuality is not so obvious,as the whole reports are official military news commentaries in written language.More importantly,generic intertextuality in cultural context promotes the realization of pragmatic functions and the communication of specific ideology.The analysis shows that the generic intertextuality of the official military news commentaries is mainly realized by a mixture of various discourse types like narration,exposition,description,argumentation and a blend of different discourses belonging to specific social domains such as military,law,economy,and such a mixture helps to promote textual coherence both in content and logic so as to improve the persuasiveness of speakers' speeches.Besides,the frequent shift of subject position and the use of relexicalization in generic intertextuality enable journalists to raise questions on Chinese military parade and express "Chinese military threat theory" in the name of authority.In addition,journalists seek for ideological identity in the role of world leader,showing the American cultural belief of their so called"Divine Mission",which can exert influence on readers' value orientation as well as their cognition on Chinese military parade.