so called a “pseudo-news story”2. As indicated by many scholars, communicative purposes play a crucial role in determining genre membership. In consequence, generic intertextuality is bound to be found in CPRs. Give n the significance of CPRs in business success as mentioned above, it is necessary to devote ef forts to exploring the gen eric intertextuality of CPRs.
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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW
In this chapter, the paper will present a literature review of previous studies on generic intertextuality and CPRs respectively.
2.1 Review of Generic Intertextuality
As a subordinate category of intertextuality , generic interextuality receives relatively little attention from previous studies as mentioned in Chapter One. Therefore, it is necessary to know some releva nt concepts before explai ning generic intertextuality itself and this part will star t with a review of intertextuality, after which gener ic intertextuality will be explained in detail. Bakhtin (1984) proposed dialogism in an alyzing Fyodor Mikhailvish Dostoevsky’ s works, from the perspective of social utte rance exchanges. For him, a dialogue is not confined to face-to-face conversation, but refers to any for m of utterance exchanges. Since utterances only occur at a certain historical moment and under conditions of certain social situation, no utteran ces can be completely original and must be responses to others. As Bakhtin stated “W hen the listener perceives and understands the meaning of speech, he sim ultaneously takes an active, responsive attitud e toward it...Any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or less er degree. He is not, after all, the first speaker , the one who distur bs the eternal silence of the universe.” (Bakhtin, 1999: 124) In order to express th emselves, people use a specific m ixture of discourses that they have appropriated wh en they speak (qtd. in S till and Worton, 1990). The dialogical perspective of discour ses reveals that a sp eaker’s ideological intention serves as both responses to previous utterances and the responded utterances for future ones. Hence, “All utterances are dialogic, their m eaning and logic dependent upon what has previou sly been said and on how they will be received by others.” (qtd. in Allen, 2000: 19) Bakhtin’s theory of language dialogism has a great influence on the term “intertextuality”.
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2.2 Review of Corporate Press Releases
In this part, the paper will first ex pound on the purposes of CPRs and then review previous studies on them.As the name suggests, CPRs are a for m of written comm unication from a business organization to the press about anything that is considered to be newsworthy. They are aimed at obtaining positive publicity via ne ws coverage since positive publicity can reward companies with valuable nam e recognition, credibility and ancillary sales benefits4. In this way , CPRs turn into a m ediated discourse, whereby inform ation meant to reach the general public is addressed to journalists as necessary go-betweens (Catenaccio, 2008). Consequently , companies have to report on their news in an objective way to make it newsworthy in the eyes of journalists. However , with the advent of the World Wide Web, the general public, especially corporate stakeholders, such as investors and consumers, can read CPRs directly from company websites. That is why Tom (2007) contends that given that the
