Conversational Textual Analysis And Interpretation Of News Discourse

Dialogicality is a part of the attributes of human activity, which also pertains to an essential nature of discourse. Dialogue, as a theory, is manifold, covering such a wide range of fields as philosophy, literature, linguistics, sociology, communication and education. Bakhtinian dialogic theory is an approach to regularities of linguistic arts and aesthetics. Within a framework of Bakhtinian dialogic theory combined with communicative, narrative and critical ones, this study explores the social functions of dialogicality and their expressive features in news discourse from the analytic aspects of subjectivity, voice and intertextuality. Through textual analysis, it further reveals and interprets the sense-making devices and discourse strategies that realize those dialogic functions in news discursive practice.Research findings suggest that narrative news discursive construction represents a potential norm of dialogic relationship between implied author and implied reader, and various expressions of narrative subject. News source attribution manifests intentional strategies in different news genres. Rhetorical questions in editorials serve as hidden polemic double-voiced discourse. Dialogic engagement of intertextual heteroglossia, explicitly and implicitly mingling assertion, challenge, response, explanation or reply, illustrates a relation between discourse and power as well as a stance-taking of ideological transformation in news reporting.It is concluded that human activity to know the world is in nature a dialogic process between self and other, which functions as an exchange and negotiation in discursive social practice. The production of news discourse means a response to previous and future utterances, and its interpretation involves a dialogue among reader, author and character in text. Such a dialogicality consists in integrating voice, consciousness and modality in the implicature level, and also in the structure level, such as identity construction in dialogic relation, inner dialogue of double-voiced construction, and ways of absorbing other's speech and another text.The dissertation argues that in the globalized and pluralistic society, what needs is a dynamic and intersubjective dialogue, exchanging ideas and acknowledging differences, rather than imposing views on others in journalism and communication.