A Comparative Study Of Dialogicity Of Speech Reporting In Chinese And English News Discourse

Dialogue is an important concept in Bakhtin’s dialogic theory. It allows the presence of others’voice or the alien voice to form the dialogic relation with one’s own voice in language use. Bakhtin believes that all discourses existing in human activities are dialogic in nature and dialogicity is the intrinsic attribute of discourse. However, Bakhtin has only discussed it in theory, which lacks the micro-systematic observation of language use. And he confines his dialogic textual analysis to literary genres, mainly the works of Dostoevsky. The analysis of dialogicity has been limitedly applied to public discourses. News discourse, as an important genre of human public discourse, plays a crucial role in modern society. It is necessary to uriderstand the nature of news and the similarity and difference of Chinese and English news dicourse. Analyzing the dialogicity of news discourse is a major method to understand the nature of news. The reported speech abounds in news report. Therefore, our analysis of dialogicity of speech reporting in English and Chinese newspaper news is to find out their similarity and difference and disclose new characteristics of news discourse as a genre defined by objectivity.We adopt Bakhtin’s Dialogue Theory as the theoretical framework and use Halliday’s SFL as the analytical tool to conduct a comparative study of the dialogicity of reporting speech in English and Chinese news reports about the phenomenon of "Tiger Mother". Our analysis is conducted at two levels, which connects a theory-driven top-down dialogic look at texts with a data-driven bottom-up linguistic description of the text. And our comparative study draws both quantitative and qualitative approaches.Through comparison, we find both English and Chinese news texts manifest a strong and apparent dialogicity by using speech reporting. Their similarities are on one side, four different parts of speech (verb, noun, adjective and preposition) of reporting signals are used in both texts and reporting verbs account for a large proportion. On the other side, the neutral reporting signal is still the most frequently used one in both English and Chinese discourse, and its proportion in both texts is almost the same. Their differences are that although the size of English corpus is smaller than that of Chinese, its number and frequency of reporting signals are more than those of Chinese. Besides, in both texts although the percentage of frequency of neutral verb is much higher than that of message-evaluating verb, it does not conform to the same tendency in terms of the percentage of the number. There is a striking difference in terms of distribution of news source. In Chinese news texts, voices are distributed in a relatively balanced way; whereas in English news texts, the discourse right is largely attributed to a single party. Therefore, Chinese news discourse shows a higher level of dialogicity. In Chinese news texts, only one news source is attributed to the reporter; whereas in English news texts,53of them are from the reporter, whose percentage is almost35times more than that of the former. This difference results in the less objective English news report. And this conclusion can be further proved by the discussion of the function of dialogicity of discourse. We find that dialogicity is the nature of news discourse and the Chinese discourse we study show a stronger dialogicity and objectivity than the English discourse.