Intertextuality as Discourse Strategy:The Case of No-Confidence Debates in Thailand

by
Savitri Gadavanij
School of Language and Communication, National Institute of Development Administration

The discourse of Thai parliamentary no-confidence debates is intended to be formal in nature, and is defined as such by the constitution and relevant parliamentary regulations. However, the reality of this ‘parliamentary’ discourse does not always meet this idea. There is evidence of mixed genres and the combination of the language user’s (henceforth S) voice and other’s throughout the discourse of the debate. The combination of genres and voices in the discourse represents two levels of intertextuality (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999 : 49).

This paper argues that intertextuality is part of the in-built structure of the no-confidence debate discourse which operates in the face of three competing conjunctures: the debate’s purpose, its multiple audiences and its code of behaviour. Intertextuality reflects the struggle of the members of the Thai parliament ot balance three purposes: the desire of highly partisan debaters to cause maximum damage to the opposing side, there need to seek public support and the need to stay within the parliamentary codes of behaviour. In this light, intertextuality can be seen as a strategy enabling MPs to produce a kind of discourse that can serve these competing social and political purposes, and to do so within the constraints of its three conjunctures.

Introduction
This paper tries to analyse the role of intertextuality in Thai no-confidence debate discourse. It adopts
Chouliaraki and Fairclough’s 2-level definition of intertextuality; the combination of genre and the combination of voices within the discourse. It argues that this can be used as a strategy to produce the most effective discourse within that particular context. This hypothesis is based on the concept of genre as ‘a socially ratified way of using language in connection with a particular social practice’ (Fairclough, 1995 : 14) such as interview genre, narrative genre, parliamentary genre and the concept of voice as an indication of who the participants of the discourse are and what identity they assume. This paper adopts discourse analysis’s assumption that language has dialectical relationship with the society. Therefore, since genre and voice are the textual representation of the interface between
discourse and society, the changing articulation of genre and the use of more than one voice may have the potential to redefine the context within which the discourse takes place. In this light, it can also be seen as a discourse strategy.

We begin section 2 with some background on Thai no-confidence debates to enable the reader to appreciate the role of these debaters within Thai society. Also we move on to the linguistic literature in an attempt to define the term intertextuality. Section 3 describes the data used in the analysis and the scope of our study. Section 4 to Section 6 are the intertextual analysis. We adopt Chouliaraki and Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999 : 60) to analyse no-confidence debates discourse. This framework is used in order to detect intertextuality in the discourse and how it works. The analytical framework starts with the analysis of conjunctures in Section 4, the analysis of the relevant social practices in Section 5 and the analysis of the discourse in Section 6. The overall outcome of the CDA analysis is discussed in Section 7.

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