A Comparative Analysis Of Reported Speech In News Reports On Xinjiang

News reports transmit messages, and at the same time also convey ideologies to readers. Critical discourse analysis aims to discover power and ideology behind language, so news discourse has become its common subject. Reported speech is a very important part of news discourse, and the use and choice of reported speech in reports can reflect reporters’ ideologies. Thus it is necessary to research reported speech from critical discourse analysis. This thesis chooses 24 reports on Xinjiang from China Daily and The Guardian respectively and researches reported speech in them from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.In this study both qualitative method and quantitative method are used to research the reported speech of the corpus from three dimensions: mode of reported speech, reporting verb and news source. The quantitative method is used to find out the using features of reported speech in the two papers, and then the contrastive method is used to find out the differences and similarities of the two papers in using reported speech. At last the qualitative method is used to explore what kind of ideologies the reports on Xinjiang in the two papers can reflect through reported speech.The results include: on mode of reported speech, indirect speech is used most in both papers; but China Daily uses more indirect speech, and The Guardian uses more the narrative report of speech act. On reporting verb, in both papers neutral reporting verbs are used more, but the frequency of positive and negative reporting verbs is low; however, in The Guardian the frequency of positive and negative reporting verbs is higher than that in China Daily. On news source, the news source of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party is the most in both papers; but the news source of the terrorist organizations and terrorists like World Uighur Congress and Kadeer is more in The Guardian, yet the news source of the Chinese government is more in China Daily.Through analyzing reported speech in reports on Xinjiang of China Daily and The Guardian, the thesis finds that there are similarities and differences in using reported speech in reports on Xinjiang of China Daily and The Guardian, and different ideologies are reflected, and the reasons for this include political, economical, historical, social, and cultural reasons.And the research of this thesis enriches the comparative researches of reports on Xinjiang, complements studies to reported speech and also helps people understand reported speech. At the same time unveiling the ideologies and tendencies reflected by English news reports on Xinjiang of China Daily and The Guardian is helpful for foreign publicity of China.