A Tentative Comparison Of Speech Reporting In Chinese And English Political News Discourses

Owing to the widespread influence of mass media, news, as a main means of diffusing information, becomes the subject of a great deal of intellectual scrutiny. Under this trend, Critical Discourse Analysis came into being, aiming at disclosing the relationships between language, power and ideology through the studies on public discourses. What is of particular interest here is the speech reporting in news discourses because of the essential role it plays in news reporting.However the early studies on speech reporting are restricted to the domain of grammar study and literary study. Contemporary studies of speech reporting have significantly shifted their focuses from the traditional concern with syntactic operations to the situated accounts of speech reporting which are sensitive to historical and social contexts and discourse types. Thus in this thesis, we will take a discourse-pragmatic perspective.The present study mainly draws on Fairclough's three-dimensional framework of critical discourse analysis. The comparison between the speech reporting in Xinhua Daily and USA Today on the reporting of French unrest is conducted from two perspectives: modes of speech reporting and news sources. Our investigation reveals that Xinhua Daily is inclined to use more unidentified sources and the mode of slipping than USA Today. However, the general impression we get is that Chinese reports are more concerned with the event as such while American reports focus on the reasons for the unrest, being a little bit critical of the French government.The whole thesis consists of six chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter One is a retrospection of the studies on speech reporting. Chapter Two is a brief introduction to critical discourse analysis. Chapter Three deals with the data collection and research methodology. Chapter Four devotes to the comparison of reporting modes. Chapter Five is about the comparison of news sources. Chapter Six probes into cultural and institutional conventions, seeking to interpret the discrepancy between the speech reporting in Xinhua Daily and USA Today.The whole thesis is concluded with a summary of the main points and a brief...