A Comparative Study Of Reported Speeches In Chinese And Foreign English News Discourses About Occupy Central Movement

News discourse, as a kind of discourse type, has developed and improved progressively in social life. Reported speech is the important content of news discourse and is also the significant technique of expressing opinions for news reporters. News discourse is seemingly objective and fair, however, by use of reported speech, reporters can convey the ideology of the class or the nation which they represent.Occupy Central Movement is a large-scale rally that took place in Hong Kong in late September, 2014. Participants in the movement barricaded the streets, blocked traffic, and made conflict in order to express dissatisfaction with the new electoral system. This movement has aroused strong repercussion and important media around the world have made successive reports about it.This paper is a comparative study of news reports on Occupy Central Movement from China Daily, USA Today and The Guardian from the perspective of reported speech which is analyzed from its mode, source and verb. Fifteen hard news reports from each of the three newspapers are chosen. The purpose of the study is to find out how news reporters of the three mainstream media express their different attitudes or stances by using reported speeches when they report the same event.Through both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the selected data, the study has the following major findings.China Daily is inclined to apply more indirect speech which accounts for 73.51%. The percentage of explicit source from Hong Kong officials, supporters of Beijing and Chinese influential media reaches up to 90.98%, which reflects the close nepotism between Chinese central government and this medium. Meanwhile, news reporters like to use the opponents of this movement as the subjects of positive reporting verbs so as to express their opposition to this movement.As for USA Today, the most distinguishing characteristic is that this newspaper prefers to use preset direct speech to express the original utterances of opponents of this movement, which intends to show reporters‘ distance and disagreement with them and thus implicitly express their support for the movement. The implicit source from pro-movement side accounts for nearly half proportion, and more than half of the doers of negative reporting verbs are from anti-movement HK government officials or experts. Both the results show that this newspaper holds supportive attitude towards this movement basically.The Guardian also shows more interest in preset direct speech. Meanwhile, the total percentage of the doers of negative reporting verbs from Chinese side takes up 88.24%, by which reporters can express their positive attitudes towards the movement and are able to construct a negative image for China and Chinese media.This study can not only help us further know the techniques of news language, but also enhance readers‘ critical awareness and sensitivity when reading news reports so as to profoundly understand the operation of news media.