| As an important linguistic phenomenon, language reports occur frequently in newspapers, and have become an striking feature of news discourse. However, There’s no systematic comparative study on language reports between English and Chinese news discourse. This dissertation makes a comparative analysis of the use of language reports between Chinese and English newspapers in order to explore the reasons behind the similarities and differences, in hope of increasing people’s understanding of language reports and improving their abilities to read and write news discourse.Firstly, for reporting modes, we found that the most frequently used mode is indirect reporting, followed by direct reporting, free direct reporting, free indirect reporting and narrative report of speech acts. In comparison with Chinese newspapers, English newspapers use much more direct speeches and free direct speeches, which are relevant to the capitalistic nature of the Western world, and also manifest the commercialization of the newspaper industry. However, Chinese newspapers use a lot of indirect speeches, which are related to the official nature of Chinese newspapers. The most frequently used mode in Chinese and English newspaper headlines is indirect speech, which has gradually formed a special and fixed writing style, especially in Chinese newspapers. For the genre of news, the most frequently used modes in English are indirect speech, direct speech, and then free direct speech, but in Chinese are indirect speech, narrative report of speech acts, and then scare quotes. For the genre of features, the most frequently used modes in English are indirect speech, direct speech and free direct speech, while in Chinese are indirect speech, scare quotes, and direct speech. For comments, indirect speech is the most frequently used mode in English newspapers, followed by scare quotes, narrative report of speech acts and direct speech. However, surprisingly, in Chinese newspaper comments, the most frequently used mode is scare quote, while other modes are rarely used.Secondly, a variety of reporting verbs are used in news reporting. It is found that English newspapers use much more reporting verbs, including neutral reporting verbs, mental reporting verbs and speech act reporting verbs, compared with Chinese newspapers. We discovered that the most frequently used reporting verbs in English newspapers are the neutral reporting ones, while in Chinese newspaper speech act reporting verbs are most frequently used. Among the neutral reporting verbs,"say" is most frequently used in English, while in Chinese it is "shuo". For mental reporting verbs, the most frequently used in English is "think", but in Chinese it is "ren wei ", which is widely used by people expressing their opinions. Moreover, there are a great number of speech act reporing verbs in Chinese news reporting, such as "biao shi","qiang diao","zhi chu","ti chu","yao qiu", etc. Besides, it is interesting that the reporting verb "qiang diao" is widely used in the presidential reports in China, and now it has become a powerful verb.Thirdly, news sources would be divided into six classes:government, media, expert, organization, company, and common people. It is found that the most frequently used source is government both in Chinese and English newspapers. In contrast with English newspapers, Chinese newspapers use fewer expert sources, which are mostly written in vagueness. According to the linguistic features of language report, news sources can also be divided into three:specified source, unspecified source and unspecifiable source. It is showed that specified source is the most popular both in Chinese and English newspapers, which is then followed by unspecified source and unspecifiable source in frequency. What’s more, we also explore the different dialogic patterns of Chinese and English newspapers:Chinese newspapers prefer a "bamboo" pattern, while English newspapers tend to employ a "net" pattern.The research has important theoretical, methodological and pedagogical implications. Theoretically, this study will deepen the understanding of speech reporting, and widen the scope of CDA, manifesting the interdisciplinary trend between linguistic and other social fields. Methodologically, this study applies a series of techniques of corpus linguistics which are combined with CDA in the comparative analysis between English and Chinese newspapers. Pedagogically, it suggests that teachers should avoid the mechanical transformation from direct speech into indirect speech, in order to improve their teaching language reports through the real language data. Finally, this study also contributes to developing the ability to use discursive strategies in foreign affairs and intercultural communication for Chinese media. |
PDF Full Text Request