| Mikhail Bakhtin was a famous Russian philosopher, literary critic and semiotician who worked mainly on literary theory, ethics and the philosophy of language. From the perspective of literary review, Bakhtin hold the opinion that every single utterance can be stratified into various voices, and such coexisting property of multiple voices is exactly a typical feature in novel literature. The word heteroglossia in English is initiated to interpret a simultaneous use of different voices or other consciousness, the tension between them, and their conflicting relationship within one text. The notion of heteroglossia was originally applied in literary discourse, but then it was also gradually used in other non-literary discourses.News discourse is such a kind of non-literary discourse which involves more heteroglossia. News, just as its name implies, refers to latest information. Fan Changjiang, a famous journalist in China, defined news as those important but unknown facts that the general public aim to know and also have to know. According to the property of reported events, news can be divided into two types: hard news and soft news. For one, hard news refers to a kind of news reports which is thoughtful, instructional and knowledgeable with serious themes. Hard news, therefore, is related to national economy and the people’s livelihood.This thesis will analyze the heteroglossia in English hard news discourse and discuss several questions about heteroglossia in hard news reports. For instance, what linguistic resources may cause and imply various voices; what are the relationships between the authorial voice and those external voices; what interpersonal functions can heteroglossia realize in news reports. Several relevant theories in this thesis are the heteroglossic thought of Bakhtin, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics and Martin’s Appraisal Theory. For one, the Engagement System in Appraisal Theory is the theoretical framework of this thesis. The Appraisal Theory is about evaluation—that is all sorts of attitude negotiated and emotional intensity involved in discourse as well as various kinds of means declaring values and attracting readers.(Martin & Rose, 2003) It is a further development of interpersonal functions in the Systemic Functional Linguistics. The Engagement System in Appraisal Theory focuses on the linguistic resources which indicate the sources of voices and the negotiatory ways in which utterances realize interpersonal functions. Engagement can be achieved by monogloss and heterogloss. For one, heteroglossic resources are divided into dialogically expansive and dialogically contractive parts, either of which has its corresponding linguistic resources.In order to collect data, this thesis selects 30 pieces of English hard news which were published in the front page of The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian in January 2016. Those hard news reports are about international situation, national policy, market quotation, climate change and epidemic situation. Under the guidance of the Engagement System, this thesis analyzed and concluded several linguistic resources that can cause and mark multiple voices in one text. In addition, it summarized the interpersonal relationships between the authorial voice and external voices. From the perspective of the interpersonal function, the thesis found that heteroglossia in news reports can be used to reflect the coordination among different voices, adjust the viewpoint of narrating and the distance from readers and then express reporter’s appraisement and attitude towards certain proposition. Besides that, this study also suggested that readers should possess a dialectical thought and cautious attitude when they read or study news reports so as not to be influenced by the ideology of reporters. |
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