A Narrative Study On Subjectivity In Chinese Legal News

Narratology,as an interdisciplinary research,provides a new perspective for the study of Chinese legal news discourse.Legal news narratives are the reconstruction of news facts with strong narrative characteristics.In this process,narrators' subjective stance is inevitably conveyed.However,most legal news tends to excessively dramatize when telling a story.Based on a self-compiled corpus of 135 episodes of narrative legal news----Legal Report in China Central Television(CCTV)(from January 1st to May 31st,2015),this study analyzes the manifestation of dramatization in the reconstruction and narrators' manipulation of language therein from the three levels of narrative proposed by Ryan(2004):story level,discourse level and interpretative context level.Both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are applied in this study.Study results indicate that legal news narration conveys excessive permeation of subjectivity as demonstrated in data.Specifically,first of all,in the story level,headlines,as the generalization of a piece of story,compared with other elements like"when","where" or"why",pay special attention to "what" element where highly abstract and vague narration is mainly adopted;secondly,in discourse level,multiple attitude resources,especially appreciation resource,are frequently adopted in legal news and mainly displayed explicitly,which are determined by the function of legal news and narrators' intentions and stances;the interactive use of both negative and positive attitude resources indicates the interpersonal intention of news narrators to disparage the evil and praise the good;lastly,in the interpretative context level,the arrangement of sequential organization of news narratives reveals news producer's subjective inclination.Different arrangements of narrative sequence and narrative duration surely affect audience's evaluation of the legal news.Hence,this research is attempted to enrich narrative discourse analysis,help the audience better interpret legal news and guide the press to keep a balance between law-education and story-narration.