ABSTRACT
This final chapter of Part two is a discussion of intertextuality. Intertextuality simply means the way in which one text impinges on other later texts, or, to put it another way, how texts feed off and relate to one another. In many ways, this chapter sums up the previous two chapters and the concluding section of Chapter 1 on genre. First, intertextuality is an aspect of inferencing. The "background" or "factual" knowledge, the assumptions and schemas which we bring to texts in order to infer meanings, are largely derived from other texts. Second, intertextuality relates to genre because it is through encountering examples of different texts in different social situations that we perceive typical text patterns and build up a mental model of the discourse structure of different genres. Within these genres or discourse types there will also be typical subject positions for readers and writers.
