| In the creation of news reports,in addition to objectively reporting events that occur and conveying information on current events,news reporters inevitably express their own interests and their views and attitudes on objective events,that is,conveying themselves,and the country or government they represent.Therefore,reported speech as an important part of news discourse has also aroused the interest of the academic circle.Among them,the reporting verb,as an important conjunction leading the reported speech,whose use of reporting verbs contains the ideology behind news reports,also plays an important role in the study of speech reporting phenomena.In recent years,a large number of studies have compared the reported speech in Chinese news discourse and English news discourse from the aspects of news source and reporting modes,while few of them concentrate on reporting verbs.In addition,most comparative studies have previously adopted disaster and political event news discourses,and few have studied economic news discourses.In view of this,this research has built two small corpora,including 32 hard news reports on "Sino-US trade war" each in the China Daily and Washington Post so as to explore the use characteristics of reporting verbs in the two corpora.On the basis of Fairclough’s(1989)three-dimensional framework,this thesis proposed a refined classification of reporting verbs,which is further enticed by Xin & Gao’(2018),Geis’(1987)and Yamashita’s(1998)classifications of reporting verbs.Besides,a refined analytical framework for reporting verbs in hard news is also proposed.Under the proposed classification,there are three categories of reporting verbs including neutral reporting verbs,emotive reporting verbs and performative reporting verbs,and all of them are tagged manually and processed statistically via AntConc in accordance with frequency.The current study finds that the overall distribution of reporting verbs in the two corpora is quite similar.Generally,among the three categories,neutral reporting verbs account for the largest part,followed by performative reporting verbs and emotive reporting verbs,and reporting verbs are diversified.Despite the general similarity in the distribution,significant differences are found in the frequency of two categories of reporting verbs.On the one hand,the neutral reporting verbs in the China Daily are used more frequently than the Washington Post in order to prevent the objectivity and authenticity of the news from being weakened,which reaches statistical significance.On the other hand,although the emotive reporting verb has the lowest proportion in The Washington Post,it is used more frequently than those in China Daily and reach statistical significance,and most of them carry negative emotions,which fully reflects the US’s suppression of China on trade issues and its hegemonism.In addition,this thesis analyzes the use of commonly used reporting verbs in two corpora with specific examples,and finds that "say" is the most widely used reporting verb and can best reflect the objectivity of news reported speech.This thesis has certain reference value for the study of reporting verbs and the reading and creation of news reports.On the one hand,this thesis proposes a classification that is more suitable for reporting verbs in hard news,which to a certain extent enriches the perspective of research on reporting verbs in hard news.On the other hand,the findings of this thesis also have certain enlightening value on the writing of Chinese news reporters,such as increasing their awareness of the proper use of reporting verbs,in order to pursue high-quality news reporting,improve the strength of Chinese news media reporting,and uphold the great-nation image of China.In addition,this thesis can to a certain extent remind the news readers to read the news with a critical mind and pay attention to the ideology behind the news report. |
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