Interdiscursivity and Promotional Discourse:A Corpus-Assisted Genre Analysis of About Us Texts on Chinese University Websites

The debate on the marketization of discourse in higher education has sparked and sustained interest among researchers in discourse and education studies across a diversity of contexts.While most research in this line has focused on marketized discourses such as advertisements,little attention has been paid to promotional discourse in public institutions such as the About us texts on Chinese university websites.The goal of the present study is twofold:first,to describe the generic features of the university About us texts in China;and second,to analyze how promotional discourse is interdiscursively incorporated in the discourse by referring to the broader sociopolitical context.Findings have indicated five main moves:giving an overview,stressing historical status,displaying strengths,pledging political and ideological allegiance,and communicating goals and visions.Move 3,displaying strengths,has the greatest amount of information and can be further divided into six sub-moves which presents information on campus facilities,faculty team,talent cultivation,disciplinary fields construction,academic research,and international exchange.The main linguistic and rhetorical strategies used in these moves are analyzed and discussed.

Studies on Interdiscursivity

The present paper defines interdiscursivity as the mixing of diverse genres, discourses, or styles in a single text. It also traces the origin of interdiscursivity and takes it as a special kind of intertextuality. Then the paper gives a review of interdiscursivity studies in literary and non-literary fields. The former is usually conducted from the stylistic approach, while the latter from the CDA （critical discourse analysis） approach. The contributions and limitations of the previous studies are also summarized with the purpose of presenting an objective picture of the research. Based upon the detailed review, the paper offers some perspectives for the future research. It is hoped that this will shed some light on our understanding of interdiscursivity.

The Four Categories of Chinese Discourse on Human Rights and Their Interrelationships

In China,the main discourse on human rights can be classified into four categories:political discourse,policy discourse,institutional discourse,and academic discourse.These four categories show significant differences in terms of the context,content,mode of expression,characteristics,and functions of the discourse.They cannot be simply equated or interchangeable with one another.However,they also rely on,restrict,and promote each other,and under certain conditions,they can be transformed into one another.It is needed to prevent imbalances,mismatches in context,isolation,and inadequate translation among human rights discourses.Meanwhile,it is essential to promote balanced development among different discourses,where each discourse maintains its own boundaries,refers to one another,and undergoes accurate translation,in order to construct their healthy interrelationships.Exploring appropriate methods of translation between discourses is an important and worthwhile topic for research in Chinese human rights discourse.It holds significant practical significance and academic value in constructing the Chinese human rights discourse system.

Exploring Generic Features in China-Africa Corporate Advertising:A Critical Genre Analysis

China-Africa corporate advertising is emerging as an example of the corporate advertising genre in response to the specific rhetorical context of China-Africa win-win cooperation.Drawing on Bhatia’s Critical Genre Analysis(2017),this study explores the text-internal and text-external generic features of China-Africa corporate advertising by analyzing 50 collected samples.The analysis of text-internal prominence shows that China-Africa corporate advertising is unique in its frequent use of win-win-oriented and sector-dependent technical lexicons to indicate the promotional intent.It is also found that move structures vary across different sub-types of ChinaAfrica corporate advertising.Text-externally,the findings reveal a mixture of different discourses within the discursive space of China-Africa corporate advertising.In addition,the results suggest that Chinese companies invest more rhetorical efforts in enhancing the China-Africa community than African counterparts who tend to perceive China-Africa cooperation as the main avenue to attract worldwide partnerships.The findings have some practical implications for discourse construction in the Belt and Road Initiative context and shed light on the evolving nature of advertising discourse,particularly in the China-Africa win-win business context.

Generic Variation & Private Intention: A MultiDimensional Exploration of Book Reviews and Prefaces

Based on Bhatia＇s multi-dimensional analytical framework for discourse analysis, we explore key issues involved in genres construction such as private intention, manipulation of generic value and interdiscursive strategies. Two prefaces and two book reviews by expert linguists were collected and analyzed at great length from both text-internal and text-external perspectives. Meanwhile, four professionals from relevant disciplines were interviewed for their insights into the issues investigated. Through examining textual features, covert interdiscursivity and narrative accounts of the professional writers, the following findings are generated. 1） Generic variation occurs within and between the two genres due to expert writers＇ intentional manipulation of generic value. 2） Interdiscursive strategies like ＂genre embedding＂, ＂genre bending＂ and ＂genre mixing＂ are exploited by expert writers to achieve their particular private intention. Specifically, preface genre can be presented, to some extent, as a research article mixed with some promotional flavor, and features of research article genre, promotional genre and introductory genre are found mixed in the review genre. 3） Representations of the preface and book review genres such as linguistic feature, move structure and interdiscursivity are ultimately affected by generic value, authors＇ private intention, professional practice and disciplinary culture. The findings have important implications for ESP/EAP writing practitioners and learners.