INTERTEXTUALITY, INTERDISCURSIVITY AND HYBRID GENRES

Abstract

Within the framework of cognitive-discursive paradigm present article attempts to define the categories of intertextuality and interdiscursivity and to investigate their relation to the phenomenon of genre hybridity. Both categories originate in Bakhtinian ideas about the dialogic nature of texts and heteroglossia. However, as the analysis of the literature showed, the notions of dialogicality, intertextuality and interdiscursivity bear significant differences. Dialogicality is seen as a general principle of language use, discourse, and cognition, as the inherent, innate ability to indulge in dialogue. Interdiscursivity, on the other hand, in most general terms, is understood as a socially significant linguistic phenomenon which focuses on dialogical relations between different language conventions related to social tendencies or ideological significances which are reflected in elements of genres, discourses, and styles, and signalled by specific linguistic forms, including certain lexical units, sentence structure and prosody. And intertextuality is the notion denoting overall property of texts, finding its expression in the presence of connections between them, through which texts can implicitly or explicitly refer to each other. Therefore, as can be seen from the definitions provided, these categories, albeit conceptually close, differ primarily on the level of abstraction. It is also notable that due to increasing role of information technology and multi-media in all spheres of modern human life, interdiscursivity along with recontextualization of certain social practices in new social and cultural contexts often results in emergence of hybrid genres not only in writing but in live conversations as well. Moreover, genre hybridity can be often traced in art, advertising and cinematography, which allows analysts to to conduct multimodal discourse analysis.