| As a representative of French structuralism and post-structuralism,Roland Barthes is a famous French semiotician,literary critic,and thinker,whose study of signs is pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure.Barthes’ semiotic thought is established on several of Saussure’s binary divisions between langue and parole,synchronic study and diachronic study etc.Barthes forms his own semiotic thought against the background of structuralism led by Saussure who focuses too much on the internal part of the language system.Since the concept of hypertext was put forward,many of its features have been recognized and accepted.For example,hypertext usually enjoys the features of multilinearity,infinite meaning and intertextuality.The form of hypertext technically supported by the internet has been widely studied and discussed due to its distinctive hypertext features.In addition,many studies on hypertext only set the reader’s cognitive or the narrative perspective as their starting point,while there are few studies focusing on whether there are hypertext features in news texts in traditional newspapers and magazines from a semiotic perspective.Using Roland Barthes’ semiotic thought and his theory of text as its analytical framework,this thesis aims to find out hypertext features in traditional newspapers and magazines.It focuses on whether news texts in traditional newspapers and magazines have commonalities with Roland Barthes’ ideal text,providing enlightenment for text writing and interpreting.This thesis selects news texts from The New York Times and TIME respectively,representing two different news styles,namely,hard news and soft news,as its research objects.Using Roland Barthes semiotic thought and his theory of the text as its framework,the thesis discusses the following three research questions by adopting both quantitative study and qualitative study:(1)From the perspective of Barthes’ theory of text,what are the codes and meanings in soft and hard news texts in traditional newspapers and magazines?(2)How is the intertextuality concretely manifested in the news texts in traditional newspapers and magazines?(3)On the basis of the commonalities between Roland Barthes’ theory of text and hypertext,what respective hypertext features of soft and hard news texts selected in this study?Through analysis,the following main conclusions are drawn:(1)The five codes proposed by Barthes to form the "tissue"(text)are all reflected in selected news texts,containing different meanings but are overlapped with each other.Thus,they aim to achieve meaning extension and to allow the readers to participate more in the generation of the text;(2)Intertextuality is manifested in various ways in news texts.Three types of intertextuality ─ direct quotation,indirect reference,and expressions associated with other types of documents(e.g.,metaphors,stock phrases,idioms or proverbs etc.)can be found.Connections are established between texts,text and the reader,so that the readers can better participate in the process of meaning generation;(3)The hypertext features of news texts share a great number of commonalities with Roland Barthes’ ideal text.There are both commonalities and differences in the two news styles.The five kinds of codes and intertextuality can be found in all selected news texts.But there are many differences in some areas.In terms of the distribution of codes,hermeneutic codes are more common in titles of hard news to attract the reader’s attention.The proairetic codes appear more frequently in soft news to refer to future actions.The distributions of different types of intertextuality differ in the two styles.Due to hard news’ feature of brevity,direct quotations only appear in soft news.In addition,the existence of intertextuality also depends much on the reader’s perception,deep-rooted knowledge and cognition.Thus,from the perspective of those who edit news texts,it is reasonable to consider the involvement of the readers and their reception in that the codes that made up of a text vary in the meanings they convey according to different interpretation.From the perspective of the readers,more angles of thoughts can be adopted to acquire additional meanings of the text and to get more actively into the weaving process of a text. |
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