Speech Reporting Of Hard News In China And America

It has been a long history since the western scholars began to study speech reporting. The detailed division of modes of speech reporting has been made by some famous scholars, who have also probed into some forms and functions of speech reporting in use. However, when evaluating these achievements from the perspective of modern discourse analysis, some limitations are found. The traditional grammar pays more attention to the changes of sentence structures and grammatical forms when transformations from direct speech to indirect speech happen. What’s more, scholars are more concentrated on the study of speech reporting in literary works such as fiction.Along with the development of study of speech reporting, scholars have gradually realized that the study of speech reporting should get rid of constraints of the traditional analytical frameworks, turning to the deep study of forms and function of speech reporting in various genres. The study of speech reporting in hard news, which the present domestic scholars haven’t explored from a discourse level yet, draws much more attention from this thesis. The present studies also rarely refer to comparative researches for function and using preference of speech reporting in hard news in Chinese and American newspapers. Based on the division of 5 modes of speech reporting made by Leech & Short (1981), this thesis defines new modes of speech reporting appearing in hard news of China Daily and The Washington Post, and tries to explore their forms and functions from the perspective of critical discourse analysis with sequentially exploration of the inherent reasons.This thesis draws newspapers from China Daily and The Washington Post in five continuous months at random. In each month, newspapers within a range from two to four days are chosen randomly, and then hard news is chosen randomly in each newspaper. The total number of sample texts is 61. There are 32 sample texts chosen from China Daily whose total number of words is 13514. There are 29 sample tests chosen from The Washington Post whose total number of words is 13676. The comparisons of forms and function of speech reporting in the chosen hard news are conducted in the thesis. The calculation of incidence of various modes of speech reporting also shows some using preference of the two newspapers. For instance, the two newspapers are inclined to use direct speech and indirect speech which readers have been familiar with. However, they have distinct preference for the special modes of speech reporting. For example, China Daily tends to adopt discontinuous indirect speech, whose total percentage is on the second rank over that of indirect speech.This thesis aims at disclosing the relationship between language, power and social ideology through studying speech reporting in hard news. The conclusion consists of a summary of main viewpoints of this thesis and a brief discussion of the significance and limitations of the study. There are also some suggestions for further researches in the end.