Contextual accommodation of formulaic intertexts in English press stories

Abstract

Formulaic expressions are prefabricated chunks of language ubiquitous in everyday discourse and hence constitute an important aspect of communicative competence. They are frequently adopted or adapted to evoke intertextual associations that disrupt or defamiliarize the automatized formulaic frame, as in Home Smart Home. Such disrupted or defamiliarized formulaic expressions are referred to in this article as "formulaic intertexts," which is an interesting discursive feature that has gone largely unnoticed in the literature. This article aims to explore formulaic intertexts across English newspapers in different pragmatic contexts. A textual survey and analysis were conducted on 1,681 full-length news stories to probe into the formulaic intertexts across the following six newspapers in their respective macro contexts: the China Post, the Gulf Daily News, The NY Times International Weekly, The New York Times, the Telegraph (Calcutta), and the Manchester Evening News. The exploration reveals noticeable linguistic and contextual features associated with the occurrence of a formulaic intertext, such as the scale of the newspaper, its target audience, different types of formulaic expressions, and different textual units of a news story. The survey and analysis have shed some light on the affordance between formulaic intertexts and the pragmatic contexts of the news stories.