Analysis Of Dialogicality In English News Discourse

This thesis devotes to analysis of dialogicality in English news discourse, a study of dialogue between the "textual voice / authorial voice" from the news writer and alternative voices from "others". Voices of different sources results in heteroglossic nature of the news discourse.Bakhtin's Dialogue Theory believes that all discourses existing in human activities are dialogic in nature. As a very important type of discourse in human society, news discourse is therefore dialogic without any doubt. And due to the characteristics of news manufacturing in modern time, news discourse shows a high level of dialogicality in fact. However, Bakhtin has only discussed it in theory and conducted some discourse analyses of dialogicality on literary works, mainly the works of Dostoevsky. Analysis of dialogicality has been limitedly applied to public discourses.This thesis, based on theories of Critical Discourse Analysis and Bakhtin' s ideas about dialogicality, draws upon analytical procedures and tools from Systemic Functional Grammar and Appraisal Theory to conduct in-depth analysis of dialogicality in English news discourse. It tries to answer the following questions: What are the linguistic resources to realize dialogicality in news discourse? How are they grouped? How does the news writer deal with alternative voices and engage with them? What are the possible dialogical relationships between these voices? And how does the news writer influence his readers via dialogicality?The research collects ten news reports that are hard news in Bell' s term from the two major mainstream newspapers The New York Times and USA Today as data corpus. The analysis shows that multiple voices are introduced into discourse by three major systems of linguistic resources: reported speech, modality and concession. The analysis also shows that news writers employ abundant rhetoric strategies to process alternative voices to serve for the textual voice. The whole thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One gives an brief introduction to the research significance and research purpose. Chapter Two introduces relevant theories to this study, including Theory of Dialogue, Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Grammar and Appraisal Theory and relevant previous research in this field. Chapter Three is about the data collection and research methodology. Chapter Four gives the detailed and systematic analysis of various linguistic resources by which multiple voices are introduced into news discourse, and rhetoric strategies by which the textual voice plays with alternative voices. Besides, it discusses possible dialogical relationships between these multiple voices and how the news writer influences his readers through dialogicality. Chapter Five makes a brief conclusion of whole project, and discusses about the implications and shortcomings of the research.