Critical Discourse Analysis Of Speech Reporting In News Discourse

The present thesis aims to reveal the bi-directional relationship between language and ideology, and also the functions of speech reporting in news discourses. This comparative analysis is carried out from the perspective of critical linguistics, it would focus on the textual and pragmatic functions of speech reporting in news discourse.Critical discourse analysis, usually approached from the angles of linguistics, sociology, psychology and mass media, aims to uncover the relations between language, power and ideology through analysis of linguistic forms. CDA is particularly interested in how ideology influences discourse, how discourse reacts to ideology and how they both originate from social structures and power relations, and serve society as well. Within critical linguistics, language is not an objective and transparent transmission as claimed by previous linguists, rather language is a kind of social practice, an intervening force in social processes. Language not only reflects society but also directly gets involved in the makings of social things and social relations. Critical Linguistics offers critical reading of newspapers, political propaganda, official documents, regulations, formal genres such as the interview, and so on, to show how social groups are presented in discourses. And its subjects are racial and sexual discriminations, education, law, employment, wars, nuclear weapons, political tactics, commercial behaviors and so on. Its aim is to uncover power relationships, and reveal how the power levels affect people's ideology with language in order to protect their own interests and the present social structure. The ideology and power relations in public discourses are exposed by studying the details of the linguistic structures of public discourses in the light of their social and historical context.Traditionally speech-reporting studies are approached from the grammatical perspectives, which are constrained by their focus on identifiable structures (preferably those which can be related to a model of clause and sentence structure). Scholars in this research field devote almost exclusive attention to clauses representing indirect speech form that can be derived from direct speech by grammatical transformation. With the development of discourse analysis, it is realized that forms and functions of speech reporting change in different types of discourses. Study of speech reporting should takethe textual and pragmatic factors into consideration. Actually many scholars make critical analysis by examining the linguistic features such as lexical classification, nominalization, modality, transitivity, thematic choice and so on, but few of them focus all the attention on the functions of speech reporting in news discourse. In this paper, the author intends to find out the pragmatic and textual functions of speech reporting in news discourses. The research data are two groups of news reports which are about life and work of the late Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat.. These news reports are chosen from the major news agencies of both China and America. Among them, Chinese news discourses are from China Daily, People's Daily and China Internet Information Center;American news discourses are from New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Washington Times, Associated Press, Washington Post, CNNnews, ABCnews, CNSnews, etc. The analysis was carried out from the mode, the source, reporting verbs and the content of speech reporting in order to find out relationship between language and power, and its functions of speech reporting in producing news discourse and manipulating readers' ideology.Through this comparative analysis, it is found that although news reports are always claimed to be neutral, transparent and objective, it is ideology-loaded, besides speech reporting is adopted as an important weapon in the process of imposing value and ideology upon readers. This reinforces the viewpoint of critical linguists—language is a kind of social practice, so it will be inevitably influenced by the ideology of the people and language, on the other hand, it will exert influence on the formation of people's ideology. The theoretical implication of the study is to provide a means of decoding news discourses to see how powerful groups convey dominant ideologies;moreover speech reporting can be used flexibly to help realize this goal. More attention should be paid to pragmatic and textual functions of speech reporting in our future research. The practical implication is to make a proposal of raising students' critical awareness in English language teaching, especially in the teaching of journalistic English with a view to improving their reading and writing ability.