A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Reported Speech In American And British News Reports On Essex Lorry Death

At 1:30 pm on 23 October 2019(UK time),39 people were found dead in a container of a refrigerated lorry at the Waterglade industrial park in Essex,UK.The case,involving human trafficking and human smuggling,had drawn extensive attention worldwide.America and Britain are world powers,their attitude towards some affairs such as cases about human trafficking is very important to the world situation and relationships between countries,so it is deserved to be studied.Critical discourse analysis(CDA)has attracted much attention since it was proposed.In the following decades,scholars have been constantly innovating the research methods and expanded its research content,which has made a crucial contribution to revealing the power relations and ideological properties implicit in discourse.News workers deliver information of events happening anywhere to individuals all over the world in real-time.Power relations and ideologies implied in news reports by the authorities exert a subtle influence on people.Therefore,it is of great significance to analyze the linguistic features in news discourse to learn the power relations and ideological connotations of media,even a country.In this thesis,99 news reports from The New York Times(NYT),The Washington Post(WP),The Guardian(TG),and The Independent(TI)are selected as samples to explore ideologes hidden behind the features of reported speech,and the theoretical framework of this thesis is Faircough’s three-dimensional model.This thesis mainly centers on three research questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences in the distribution,frequency and proportions of reporting modes,reporting verbs,and news sources in NYT’s,WP’s,TG’s and TI’s news reports on Essex Lorry/Truck Death?(2)What are the characteristics of the distribution,proportions,and frequency of reporting modes,reporting verbs and news sources in American and British newspapers?(3)How can we account for the similarities,differences,and characteristics in the four newspapers?To answer these three questions,the study of this thesis consists of three steps: 1)analysis of the linguistic features of reporting verbs and reporting modes in news samples;2)analysis of the intertextual nature of the news sources;3)explanation for the findings from the perspective of the relationship between discourse and society.The following are the major findings and conclusions:1.NYT,WP,TG,and TI are very similar in terms of using the reporting modes,reporting verbs,and news sources,but little differences remain in some aspects.The media of both countries intend to ensure absolute discourse power in news discourse through the extensive use of indirect speech.In addition to the absolute right of a discourse of the political parties,American newspapers give almost equal discourse power to other social classes and tend to cite the speech of individuals with authority like experts and scholars to convince the public.What’s more,the relatively small amount of unclear news sources makes American newspapers present a rigorous image.2.There are different characteristics of reported speech used in NYT,WP,TG,and TI.For example,the frequency of SRV in the news reports of NYT is the highest among the four,while the frequency of SARV is the lowest.The discourse of“ordinary people” and “firms” is quoted most frequently in TG’s reports compared with the other three.3.Discourse and practice affect each other.Discourse features of news reports of British and American media are influenced by social institutions and culture,and at the same time reflect social institutions and culture.For example,the cultural characteristics of the “melting pot” in the United States advocate individualism,American media influenced by this characteristic tend to give people of different social classes the right to speak.The study of reported speech in British and American news reports in this thesis will be enlightening to future comparative studies of reported speech in the same language.The same language determines the similarity of the use of reported speech to a large extent,consequently,the similarities and differences of reported speech should be analyzed from different aspects as far as possible,such as subdivision of categories.In addition,the continuous reports of the same case can be classified according to the developing process of the event,and the reports of the initial,climax,and end periods of the event can be respectively studied so as to find the changes of similarities and differences in different periods.