A Comparative Analysis of Reported Speeches in Chinese English News Reports on Chinas V-Day Parade in 2015文献综述

 2022-09-09 15:49:40

Literature Review

Reported speech is an integral aspect of news discourse. It is usually used to distinguish what the reporter writes and expressions quoted from others. Reporters often use reported speech to strengthen the reliability and objectivity of new reports, with its number adjusted according to the styles and contents. Geis (1987:80) says that “a news report on some event will normally consist of two things: descriptions of events---what has happened, is happening, or may happen---and descriptions of talk---what people have said (or sometimes, what people havenrsquo;t said) in connection with what has happened, is happening, or may happen.

However, the objectivity of the news reporting is questioned. The essential feature of reported speech is reflexivity, that is to say people use reconstructed language to express primary language. People not only transmit information, but also make comment on it, criticize and even question it. Reported speech in news not only exerts influence on people but also manipulates people to think critically (Xin Bin, 2005:83). It is the news reporter who determines the information or the content to be transmitted. Geis (1987:10) points out that “perhaps the single most important power of the press is its capacity to say what the important issues at any given time are and to determine whose voices will be heard on any given issue”. Every piece of news reveals the inner attitudes, intentions of the reporter. There are hidden connections between language, power, and ideologies (Fairclough, 2003). Fairclough (1988: 125) also mentions that “it is through discourse and other semiotic practices that ideologies are formulated, reproduced, and reinforced”.

Previous researches on reported speech in news discourses have been largely conducted.

2.1 Studies of News Discourse Analysis

The application of the method of discourse analysis in news discourse was first conducted by van Dijk, who sets up a new paradigm for the study of news discourse analysis. In his book News as Discourse, he studies news discourse from two aspects: news texts and news contexts. Textual dimensions account for the structures of discourse at various levels of description. Contextual dimensions relate these structural descriptions to various properties of the context, such as cognitive processes and representations or sociocultural factors (van Dijk, 1988: 25).

Before being analyzed as discourse, news is still studied in the field of communication sciences. Different researchers have different analytical method to do their researches.

Linguistic and sociolinguistic analytical methods are used by some scholars. Linguistic methods focus on the language features of media discourse, including grammar structure, special intonation and syntactical features and etc. Sociolinguistic methods pay attention to the connection between the language features and social context of the media discourse. These two analytical methods focus on the generation of surface meaning and syntactical features of news, but pay little attention to the analysis of deep meaning and the formational mechanism and environment.

Semiotics analytical method is advocated by some scholars. Those scholars holds the perspective that there are full of signs and texts made up of signs in media discourse. They focus on text analysis in order to analyze the relations between signs and social culture. How the meaning of signs is produced, how they are transmitted and the ideologies hidden behind signs are widely studied by these researchers.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is adopted by some researchers. The notion was firstly proposed as in Language and Control written by Fowler et al. (1979). On the basis of Hallidayrsquo;s Systematic Functional Grammar, they attached much importance to the description and analysis of language use and features in discourse, aiming to show how linguistic structures are used to manipulate ideas and behavior of others as well as to assert or institutional status (Fowler et al, 1979). Fowlerrsquo;s research mainly contributed to the development of methodology in this realm. CDA had a further development in 1980s and 1990s. Fairclough (1989), one of the founders of CDA, studied connections between language, ideology and power in critical discourse analysis. Another critical discourse analyst van Dijk focused on how personal and social cognition influence interaction and discourse of individual members. Van Dijk pays much attention to macro and micro aspects of news discourse through socio-cognitive approach. Another back bone of CDA is Ruth Wodak, who elaborates the Discourse Historical Approach in CDA (DHA). Wodak views CDA as an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented approach and analyzed language changes with the varying social-historical background, especially in news discourse.

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