Recontextualization and transformation in media discourse

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This study is an exploration of the recontextualization and transformation processes involved in the First-Instance Judgment of the Peng Yu Case. Through detailed analysis, major findings can be summarized as follows. First, the very same judgment went through huge changes in terms of the public’s perception because it was recontextualized in completely different context models. On close examination, we find that what matters most for the context models of this study are social and communicative roles, professional knowledge, contextual knowledge, communicative goals, and intentions. It is the alteration of the contextual factors that changed the interpretation of the very same text. Second, through the analysis of the intertextual and interdiscursive relationships among the data, it is found that they can, in a specific sense, be divided into three types: discourse of the judgment, discourse of the criticism of the judgment, and discourse of the clarification of the judgment. Different genres such as judgment, news report, TV program, and commentary, together with the corresponding styles, texts, and topics, are involved in these three discourses. Devices such as quotation, irony, and presupposition are frequently used in this recontextualization process to construct manifest intertextuality between these three types of discourses. For most of the data, traces of blended interdiscursivity formed through mixing these different discourse conventions can be found without much effort. Third, the First-Instance Judgment of the Peng Yu Case went through many transformations when it was recontextualized in the subsequent discourses. Specific transformations included addition, deletion, abstraction, rearrangement, and falsification, and they were not equally distributed in terms of usage. These different types of transformations were used by text-producers to adapt the original text to different emerging contexts.

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