A Comparative Study On Reporting Verbs In English News Discourses From China And America

China was mentioned many times both by Obama and Romney in television debates of the2012American presidential election. Media at home and America wrote large numbers of news reports on this topic. This thesis collects18pieces of news in China Daily and11ones in The New York Times&USA Today as corpora. Faiclough’s three-dimensional framework is the fundamental theory to analyze the reporting verbs in the two news corpora. The comparison of the reporting verbs will be conducted from the three angles:grammar, semantics and pragmatics.The major findings are: grammatically, the use of the generic present tense and the passive voices in China Daily is more than the American news reports. American news reports prefer to put reporting verbs in the middle of the reported speech from the perspective of positions. Semantically, focusing on transitivity and referring to Thompson’s (2000) category of reporting verbs, the author finds that both in the news reports from China and America, the chosen reporting verbs function to highlight the purpose of speaking and reflect the reporting message. However, there is a difference in the choice of reporting verbs on agreement and disagreement with the reported speech. China Daily is more flexible than the American news reports on the choice of reporting verbs of whether agreement or disagreement with speakers. Pragmatically, the analysis shows that reports from America tend to use less different kinds of affective reporting verbs than China Daily, which to some degree may give insights into the attitudes that the western mainstream media held is reserved when reporting news concerning China. When specific cases are analyzed along with news sources and reporting modes, we may more clearly see the ideology and the inclination hiding behind the choice of reporting verbs which often exert great influence upon readers of the news reports.The analysis of the news reports on the one hand can illustrate the practicality of the critical discourse analysis theory; on the other hand, readers have access to reading and thinking the news critically and deeply. Meanwhile, the concrete analysis can make Chinese reporters self-reflection to improve the quality of news reports so that it can improve the media strength to maintain the image of China as a great country.