Reporting Verbs In News Corpora

This thesis is a computer-aided investigation into English reporting verbs in two news corpora:LOBA (Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus in British English concerning news ' reportage:A text) and BROWNA (Brown Corpus of Written American English concerning news reportage:A text).With the assistance of computer software and programs,especially SNOBOL4,Visual FoxPro and SPSS,syntactic,semantic and grammatical features of reporting verbs in two news corpora comparing with two other corpora T4 and MEE are investigated. And through Chi-square tests,the frequency and distribution of neutral,positive and negative reporting verbs in news corpora are analyzed statistically. After a systematic research,the following conclusions are drawn:the overall proportion and distribution of reporting verbs between two news corpora and the other two corpora T4 and MEE are significantly different;the frequency and distribution of neutral reporting verbs between two news corpora are similar but significantly different between four corpora;say and tell are the most frequently used neutral reporting verbs;there is significant difference of the distribution of negative reporting verbs between four corpora;BROWNA uses more negative reporting verbs,while LOBA prefer positive reporting verbs.