TITLE:
Recontextualization and Legitimacy of Dialect Post-Pandemic News Releases: A Case Study of Two Pandemic News Texts in Qujing City, Yunnan Province
AUTHORS:
Jiaojue Zhao, Yongshou Huo
KEYWORDS:
COVID-19, News Release, Legitimacy, Recontextualization, Legitimated Media Discourse
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.13 No.1,
February
14,
2023
ABSTRACT: With data from “Letter of Yunnan Provincial Human Resources and Social Security Department to Friends Working Outside” released in Mandarin Chinese on January 14, 2021 by the official media Qujing M, and the “Old Village Head’s Publicity for the Pandemic” released one week later in the Qujing dialect of Chinese, this study, following the philosophy that things develop as a result of the combination of their internal and external causes, analyzes the two texts in terms of the media discourse strategy for achieving their legitimacy and interprets the inner connection between them from a recontextualization perspective. The research finds that the two texts utilized two features of the news discourse strategy in order to achieve and maintain their own legitimacy, and that as a recontextualized form of the former, the latter news text, the dialect version, has proved to be a legitimate discourse as well. These two news texts have proved to work effectively for their own anti-pandemic purposes.