| With the rapid development of mass media and its increasing influence upon people’s daily life, news discourse, the most important public mode of language use through which information is diffused in modern society, has gained more and more concern from discourse analysts. Under this trend, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) won broad popularity for disclosing the relationships among language, power and ideology through the studies on public discourses. Because the important role it plays in news reporting, speech reporting has become the focus of the study.Early studies on speech reporting were mainly confined to the field of literary criticism, which focused on the syntactic operations about the form and rhetorical features of literary discourses. Since the1990s, with the emergence and development of CDA, studies of speech reporting have shown great interest in nonliterary public discourses and have paid much attention to speech reporting in situated media discourses with their specific historical and social contexts. This paper will take a discourse-pragmatic perspective to the analysis of speech reporting in news discourse.The thesis draws on Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework to reveal the ideology of economic news discourse. This research paper makes comparison of the speech reporting in both Chinese and English on the event of China’s GDP surpassing Japan among five newspapers, namely, China Daily, Global Times, Financial Times, New York Times and Business Week. The comparison is conducted from three angles:reporting modes, news sources and reporting verbs. It is revealed that English news reports tend to use more the mode of "Preseted Direct Speech","unspecified sources" and negative reporting verbs than Chinese ones. Therefore, the general impression we get is that Chinese news reports are more objective than the western ones, because Chinese reports are more concerned with the event itself and present the facts more objectively. The differences in the historical background, cultural value, and the specific operation in each news organization all result the differences in the Chinese and English news reports.Language in news discourses are never neutral, but are the location of ideology. Thus, when we read news reports, we should read them critically. Moreover, the second-language learner should realize that they need to learn not only the grammar and vocabulary, but also the social, historical and cultural knowledge. |
