Critical Analysis Of Reported Speech In Political News Discourse

Fairclough(1992)sees language as a “construction of social reality”,and believes language is not the direct reflection of objective reality.Language is influenced by social-cultural factors and in turn shapes social cultures.News writing is supposed to be objective and impartial,but as a matter of a fact,it is ideology-loaded and to some extent,it reflects news worker's position or opinions,represents interests of particular group,and implicitly conveys attitudes,opinions and ideology to readers.The essence of critical discourse analysis is to explore the hidden ideology behind language.News discourse is composed of two parts: the description of event and the description of talk.In order to guarantee the objectivity and authenticity,reporters often quote or report others' opinions on the news-event.Reported speech plays a significant role in news discourse.Previous scholars have studied reported speeches in literary works and English academic papers,for example,Xu Jiujiu(1996)published the paper Analysis of Direct Speech in Narratives,Tang Qingye(2004)published the paper Reporting in Academic Texts etc.Xin Bin studies reported speech in political news,but his study is not corpus-based(2006,2008,2013).Different with previous studies,the present study attempts to conduct a corpus-based analysis of reported speeches in news discourse.This study takes statistic software Antcoc 3.4.4 w(windows)2014 to check the distribution and frequencies of reported speeches on the South China Sea arbitration in China Daily(CD)and New York Times(NYT)based on Fairclough's three-dimensional model from three aspects: news sources,reporting modes and reporting verbs.Chi-square test is used tocheck the differences between the two newspapers in terms of the three aspects.Leech and Short's classification of reported speech is adopted.Twenty news reports from CD and ten news reports from NYT are respectively downloaded from the official websites.The purpose of this study is to explore the differences in the choice of reporting verbs,news sources and news modes between two newspapers,ideological and attitudinal difference implied by such distribution.The major findings are revealed through data analysis as follows:1.From aspect of news sources,both newspapers have a strong tendency to use accurate news source to guarantee the objectivity and credibility of news,and implicit news source in NYT is 17% higher than that in CD,while accurate news source is 18% less than its counterpart,this shows NYT is less objective than CD;from aspect of reporting modes,the proportion of indirect speech is the largest among all reporting modes in both newspapers to blur the boundary between the original speaker's voice and the reporter's;from aspect of reporting verbs,both two newspapers tend to employ neutral reporting verbs to make the news report more objective.2.Although both newspapers prefer to use neutral reporting verbs,it does not mean that they take no sides concerning the issue in question.As a matter of a fact,whose speech and which utterance are reported depend on news workers.Therefore,to some extent,their attitudes to news-event are conveyed to readers.By analysis of the stand held by news sources and reporting contents,it is found reporters in CD tend to use positive comments to report China's attitudes towards the South China Sea disputes and negative comments to report tribunal,which conveys ideology of “harmony”,“peace” and protection for territorial sovereignty.While reporters in NYT have tendency to report opinions from Philippine and tribunal to express their supports to Philippine's act and tribunal's ruling.And they also tend to employ reporting verbs with negative connotation to comment on China's reaction to this issue,which conveys ideology of hegemonism and “China threat theory” to the public.