A Comparative Analysis Of Reporting Verbs In Chinese And English Newspapers:a Critical Discourse Analysis Approach

Studies on speech reporting have a long history in the western countries. Nevertheless, the previous researchers have been mainly concerned with reported speech in literature, or have devoted their attention to the syntactic operations for transforming direct speech into indirect speech. From the perspective of contemporary discourse analysis, more and more linguists have realized that speech reporting belongs to the discourse level and have shifted their attention to situated accounts of speech reporting which are sensitive to contexts and discourse types.There are various approaches to the study of speech reporting, such as reporting modes, news sources, reporting verbs, among which reporting verbs are of great significance as they are to elicit the reported speech. This thesis aims to conduct a comparative analysis of reported speech, especially reporting verbs, in Chinese and English newspapers from a critical discourse analysis perspective.The data to be analyzed in this thesis cover reports about London riots by People’s Daily, China Daily and the Washington Post during the period form8/8/2011to8/17/2011. Based on specific corpus, we have mainly conducted a comparative analysis of reporting verbs in the three newspapers, paying special attention to the frequency, selection, emotive effects of reporting verbs. Further more, we have also looked briefly into the differences among these three newspapers in terms of news sources and reporting modes.Through a statistical analysis, we have found that both the frequency of reporting verbs and the percentage of negative reporting verbs in the Washington Post are well above those in People’s Daily. In addition, some Chinese reporting verbs have been elaborated in this thesis, and the conclusion is:"BIAOSHI" is the most widely used reporting verb in People’s Daily, and it is more formal and serious than the reporting verb "SHUO";"BIAOSHI" and "CHENG" seem to be neutral, whereas they can convey different emotional effects combining with different discourses. Generally speaking, due to the potential factors like culture, power, ideology, Chinese and English newspapers in this thesis show significant differences in many aspects when reporting the same events.