A Comparative Study Of Speech And Thought Presentation In English And Chinese News Editorials

In the contemporary world, the mass media have become an indispensable means ofinformation exchange. Under the profound and far-reaching influence of mass media,journalistic discourse, working as the essential means of information exchange, has receivedmuch concern from scholars and become their research topic. As the ‘spirit of mass media’,the editorial reveals the ideas of general office of a newspaper that often speaks for the organof authority. With the characteristics of apparent intentionality and strong acceptability, theeditorial conveys information and opinions to manipulate the viewpoints or ideology ofcommon people. Researches both abroad and home have offered us a great majority ofperspectives from pragmatics, psychology, cognition, stylistics to contrastive analysis onEnglish and Chinese editorials.Earlier studies on speech and thought presentation, especially speech presentation, arerestricted to the domain of grammatical and literary study (Quirk et al,1985; Bullon,1990;Baynham,1996; Bobing,1972; Zhang,1978; Zhang,1983). Contemporary studies of speechpresentation have significantly shifted their focus from the traditional concern with syntacticoperations to the situated accounts of speech presentation which are sensitive to historical andsocial contexts and discourse types (Volosinov,1973; Shen,1991; Halliday,1994; Thompson,2000; Leech&Short,2001; Xin,1998,2000,2007). What is of particular interest here is thespeech and thought presentation applied in English and Chinese editorials as a means ofrepresenting the events or language action, voicing attitudes towards the information beingreported as well as impressing readers on the intended message. The objective of this thesis isto justify the different linguistic features and preference for using speech and thoughtpresentation with restriction to two aspects: the modes of speech&thought presentation andtypes of their sources by making a contrastive analysis of editorials in English and Chinese.91editorials were selected for analysis from two prominent newspapers--The People’sDaily and The Times:45in Chinese and46in English with time ranging from June,2009toMay,2011. All the editorials covered various important issues in all kinds of fields, includingpolitics, society, economy, culture, education, environment, sports and exhibition, etc. As forthe research model, Leech&Short’s (2001) model for speech and thought presentation wasadopted. All ten modes, i.e. direct speech (DS), indirect speech (IS), free direct speech (FDS),free indirect speech (FIS), narrative report of speech acts (NRSA), direct thought (DT), indirect thought (IT), free direct thought (FDT), free indirect thought (FIT), narrative report ofthought acts (NRTA), were numbered and marked in91editorials. The frequencies,percentage, mean and other aspects of these modes were measured by statistics software SPSS,mainly through the items of descriptive statistics and compare means. On the basis of fourscholars’ classifications of sources (Geis,1987; Van Dijk,1988; Bell,1991; Zhang,1994),three types of sources—specific, semi-specific, unspecific sources were also measured andanalyzed.The major findings of the thesis are as follows:The editorials of two languages are not significantly different in the total number ofspeech and thought modes. The general use preference of speech and thought presentation ineditorials does not significantly vary in English and Chinese. Percentages of DS, IS, DT, FDT,NRSA vary drastically according to editorial type. Within the modes of speech presentationand thought presentation, English and Chinese editorials show statistically significantdifference in reference to speech presentation but no significant difference in presentation ofthought. Among three types of sources, only unspecific sources do not vary in editorialsaccording to language. Specific and semi-specific sources present significant difference inEnglish and Chinese editorials. However, Most of specific sources in Chinese editorials arefrom powerful people and governmental institutions similar to those in English editorials.It is concluded that both Chinese and English reporters would like to apply speech andthought presentation as one of their writing strategies though their preference for mode differsin some aspects. Speech presentation modes, especially IS and FDS are recommended asreporters’ main choices for representing other’s utterances or thoughts. However, it dose notmean other modes are inferior to these two. It is no doubt that in other discourses thoughtpresentation would be an important vehicle for enriching characters and passage. In a word,understanding speech and thought presentation is of help for writers and readers to obtainrealization about discourse content and intention. It is hoped that the findings in this thesiswill provide some help for language learners to get to know more about linguistic features ofeditorial and speech and thought presentation as well as to further understand the relationshipsamong language, social culture and communication.