Intertextuality in hypertexts: an analysis of didactic tweets

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze different categories of the intertextuality phenomenon in didactic tweets. The term “intertextuality”, which is related to the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, comes from the literary theory and is used to refer to the dialogue between texts, both in a strict and in a wide sense. This is a common aspect to all the texts, including internet texts, that is, hypertexts, characterized, among other aspects, by a high degree of multimodality. In this article, the types of intertextuality listed by Koch, Bentes, and Cavalcante (2012) were observed in four (hyper)texts of the tweet genre. These tweets approach educational contents from different areas of knowledge - Natural Sciences, Human Sciences, Languages, and Mathematics - and were collected through screenshots. The analysis showed that several categories of intertextuality occur productively in (hyper)texts of the tweet genre, which confirms the assumption that this phenomenon is constitutive of the language. Moreover, it was found that intertextuality does not occur only verbally, since tweet, as a hypertext, allows the convergence of languages.

Keywords:
Hypertext; Intertextuality; Tweet; Twitter