Comparison On The Modes Of Reported Speech In Chinese And American Newspaper Reports

In modern society, news is playing a crucial part in spreading information and messages and has become a major source for people to learn about their own country and foreign nations. The study of news has been given top priority in the field of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), aiming at unveiling the relationship among language, ideology and power in news discourses. Speech reporting is the main content and means of news reports. Mode of reported speech is of great concern in the study of speech reporting.Based on CDA and Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework, this paper chooses thirty-six English reports about the2012UN Climate Change Conference in Doha, Qatar from China Daily, The New York Times and USA Today, trying to make a comparative analysis of the modes of reported speech in Chinese and American newspaper reports and to explore the reasons for different choices of modes and how reporters effectively convey their opinions towards the event.This thesis reveals that both Chinese and American newspapers prefer to adopt indirect reporting and direct reporting so as to make official views naturally accepted by the public and make the report more vivid and expressive. As for the differences of modes of reported speech, China Daily is apt to employ more Free Direct Speech but less Indirect Speech and Preset Direct Speech than The New York Times and USA Today. By contrast with American news, the news source of Indirect Speech is diverse and the utilization of Scare Indirect Speech is flexible in Chinese news. Besides, Chinese journalists cover more "hard news", focusing on the description of the event itself, whereas American journalists pay more attention to the critical remarks on the event. Therefore, Chinese coverage is relatively more objective and credible on the Doha conference than American coverage.Readers should enhance their critical language awareness and ability of critical discourse reading. Since the discrepancies of institution, politics, culture and social condition in each country all result in the differences in Chinese and American reports, language learners should broaden their horizon and dig the news in its socio-cultural context.