Researcher commentary on Warren (2013): The prevalence and forms of intertextuality

Abstract

The idea for this article owes much to the work of Vijay Bhatia who at the time was working just up the road from me in Hong Kong. I was fortunate to be able to hear firsthand the typology he had developed to classify forms of intertextuality. Whenever I come across an area of applied linguistics that is new to me, I am eager to apply it to my own data. This both helps me to better understand it and analyse how it is realised. My article was a first attempt to quantify the forms of intertextuality found in two corpora of email discourse flows that I had collected from two professionals working in different industries in Hong Kong, merchandising and information technology. I made adjustments to Bhatia’s typology which are detailed in the paper and set about identifying the forms of intertextuality. Given that all texts are intertextual, there was nothing surprising about finding forms of intertextuality in every email. What was of significance was that the quantities of the different forms varied across the two professionals due to the nature of their work suggesting that patterns of use are profession-specific.