Cothematic Intertextuality in a Sociocognitive Discourse-Analytical Perspective

The present study seeks to revisit the concept of intertextuality as integrated into a sociocognitive discourse-analytical perspective, whereby intertextual meanings can be explicated via semantic macropropositions, mental representations, event models, and pragmatic context models. The study’s significance derives from its scholarly endeavour to demonstrate how the semantic and rhetorical meanings of intertextuality are cognitively explicable in relation to their relevant macro social/societal structures in McGrath and McGrath’s (2007) The Dawkins Delusion? as a polemical response to Richard Dawkins’ (2006) The God Delusion. Three research questions have been posed: (1) What are the cothematic intertextual links that globally constitute the discourse(s) drawn upon in The Dawkins Delusion?? (2) How to explain the intertextual local meanings constructed and generated by their relevant event models in the same book? (3) What are the context model’s constraints that control the production and reception of the intertextual local meanings and relate them to macro social/societal structures? Methodologically, the study subjects Thibault’s (1991) notion of “cothematic intertextuality” to the sociocognitive approach presented in critical discourse studies. The data analysis has demonstrated how the global and local intertextual meanings holding between two sets of textbook data have been cognitively mediated and related to significant social/societal macrostructures.