Reported Speech in Chinese and English Newspapers: Textual and Pragmatic Functions 2020053525, 2020053526, 9781032000602, 9781003173687, 9781032003306

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Reported Speech in Chinese and English Newspapers

Reported speech is a universal form across human languages. However, previous studies have tended to be limited because they mostly emphasize on the form and authenticity of reported speech, while its discourse and pragmatic functions have largely been ignored. Meanwhile, the studies mainly focus on English, with a comparative perspective with other languages largely missing. Acknowledging these limitations, this book analyzes the textual and pragmatic functions of reported speech in Chinese and English. The authors build a corpus comprising of twelve Chinese and English newspapers, including China Daily and The New York Times. They examine the classification and distribution of reported speech, the form and function in different news genres and contexts, and the socio-​pragmatic interpretation of reported speech in news and other issues. This title can enrich comparative linguistic research, verify the feasibility of combining critical linguistics and corpus technology, and help improve the production and understanding of news reports. Students and scholars of critical discourse analysis, comparative linguistics, corpus linguistics, as well as communication studies will find this to be an essential guide. XIN Bin is Professor of the School of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Nanjing Normal University, China. His research interests include pragmatics, systemic functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis. GAO Xiaoli is Lecturer of the School of Foreign Languages, Hohai University, China. SHEN Lei is an associate professor of Nanjing Xiaozhuang University, China. Her research interest is comparative discourse analysis. WANG Jingping is an associate professor of Nanjing Xiaozhuang University, China. Her research interest is EFL writing.

China Perspectives

The China Perspectives series focuses on translating and publishing works by leading Chinese scholars, writing about both global topics and China-​ related themes. It covers Humanities & Social Sciences, Education, Media and Psychology, as well as many interdisciplinary themes. This is the first time any of these books has been published in English for international readers. The series aims to put forward a Chinese perspective, give insights into cutting-​edge academic thinking in China, and inspire researchers globally. To submit proposals, please contact the Taylor & Francis Publisher for China Publishing Programme, Lian Sun ([email protected]) Titles in linguistics currently include: Complementarity between Lexis and Grammar in the System of Person A Systemic Typological Approach Pin Wang Reported Speech in Chinese and English Newspapers Textual and Pragmatic Functions XIN Bin and GAO Xiaoli Teaching and Researching Chinese EFL/​ESL Learners in Higher Education Edited by Zhongshe Lu, Meihua Liu and Wenxia Zhang For more information, please visit www.routledge.com/​China-​Perspectives/​ book-​series/​CPH

Reported Speech in Chinese and English Newspapers Textual and Pragmatic Functions XIN Bin and GAO Xiaoli Translated by SHEN Lei and WANG Jingping

First published in English 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Originally written in Chinese by XIN Bin and GAO Xiaoli Translated from Chinese into English by SHEN Lei and WANG Jingping English translation copyright © 2021 SHEN Lei and WANG Jingping The right of XIN Bin and GAO Xiaoli to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe English Version by permission of Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Xin, Bin, 1959– author. | Gao, Xiaoli (English teacher) author. Title: Reported speech in Chinese and English newspapers : textual and pragmatic functions / XIN Bin, GAO Xiaoli ; [translated by] SHEN Lei, WANG Jingping. Other titles: Han Ying bao zhi xin wen zhong zhuan shu yan yu de yu pian he yu yong gong neng bi jiao yan jiu. English Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: China perspectives | Includes index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020053525 (print) | LCCN 2020053526 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032000602 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003173687 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Chinese language–Indirect discourse. | English language–Indirect discourse. | Newspapers–China–Style. | Newspapers–Great Britain–Style. | Newspapers–United States–Style. Classification: LCC PL1273.5 .H56 2021 (print) | LCC PL1273.5 (ebook) | DDC 495.1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053525 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053526 ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​00060-​2  (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-00330-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​17368-​7  (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of figures  List of tables 

vi vii

1 Introduction 

1

2 Introduction to reported speech 

9

3 The multidimensional research perspective of reported speech 

46

4 Reported speech in Chinese news headlines 

66

5 Reporting modes in Chinese and English newspapers (part one) 

96

6 Reporting modes in Chinese and English newspapers (part two) 

132

7 Reporting verbs in Chinese and English newspaper reports 146 8 News sources in Chinese and English newspapers 

173

9 Reported speech in different newspaper genres 

207

10 Conclusion 

227

Bibliography  Glossary  Index 

235 244 254

Figures

2 .1 Comparing and theorising  3.1 Speech and thought reporting model (Leech and Short, 1981: 344)  3.2 Reporting intervention continuum (Leech and Short, 1981: 324)  7.1 Frequency comparison box plot for the reporting verbs used in Chinese and English newspaper texts  7.2 Search legend for ‘Shuo Qi’ (speaking of)  7.3 Search legend for ‘think’  7.4 Search legend for ‘Biao Shi’ (indicate)  7.5 Search legend for ‘Qiang Diao’ (emphasise)  7.6 Search legend for ‘Zhi Chu’ (point out)  8.1 Search legend for ‘official’  8.2 Search legend for ‘spokesman’  8.3 Search legend for ‘spokeswoman’  8.4 Search legend for ‘speaker’ in Chinese  9.1 The meaning of (2d)  9.2 The difference between the original discourse and the reported speech 

27 57 57 152 155 165 167 168 169 177 178 178 179 221 221

Tables

2.1 The syntactic relationship between the semantic roles of speech verbs  2.2 The 40 most positive reporting verbs (from the strongest [detail] to the weakest [suggest])  2.3 The 40 most negative reporting verbs (from the strongest [slash] to the weakest [extol])  2.4 Low volatility reporting verbs  2.5 High volatility reporting verbs  2.6 Reporting verb categories distinguished by Yamashita  2.7 Reporting verbs distinguished by reference  2.8 Reporting verbs distinguished by their evaluative potential  2.9 Reporting verbs distinguished by Thomas and Hawes (1994)  3.1 Four types of projection relationships (Halliday 1994/​ 2000: 256)  3.2 Basic categories of projection  4.1 Chinese and English newspaper corpus categories  4.2 The overall distribution of reporting modes in different parts of Chinese and English news reports  4.3 Statistical analysis of the reporting modes used in the headline section of Chinese and English newspapers  4.4 The mean and sig. (2-​tailed) values for the various reporting modes in Chinese and English newspaper headlines  5.1 Distribution of direct and indirect speech  5.2 Frequency and proportion (%) of each reporting mode (diachronic)  5.3 Word number and proportion (%) of each reporting mode (diachronic)  5.4 Frequency and proportion (%) of each reporting mode (synchronic)  5.5 Word number and proportion (%) in each reporting mode (synchronic)  5.6 Frequency and proportion (%) of each reporting mode in the two newspapers 

20 23 23 25 25 26 28 28 29 54 55 83 84 84 85 119 125 126 127 128 128

viii  List of tables 5.7 Word number and proportion (%) of each reporting mode in the two newspapers  6.1 Chinese and English newspaper corpus categories  6.2 Frequency of occurrence of the eight reporting modes found in the Chinese and English newspaper texts  6.3 Average reported speech data in the Chinese and English news reports  6.4 Average values for the eight reporting modes used in the Chinese and English news reports  6.5 Frequencies of the five reporting modes in the Chinese and English news texts  6.6 Average values for the five reporting modes in the English and Chinese news texts  7.1 Reporting verb classification (taking English as an example)  7.2 Frequencies of the different reporting verb types in Chinese and English newspaper texts  7.3 Statistics relating to the reporting verbs in Chinese and English newspaper texts  7.4 Statistical analysis of Chinese/​English reporting verbs per 10,000 words  7.5 Distribution of the main reporting verbs found in the People’s Daily  7.6 Distribution of the main reporting verbs found in The New York Times  7.7 Standardised frequency of the 25 most frequently used reporting verbs in Chinese and English newspaper texts (per 10,000 words)  7.8 Distribution of reporting verbs in different parts of the Chinese and English newspaper discourse  7.9 Standardised frequency of reporting verbs in newspaper headlines (frequency per 10,000 words)  8.1 The number and proportion of the various types of news sources in Chinese and English newspapers  8.2 Statistical results for the average number of news sources per 10,000 words in Chinese and English newspapers  8.3 Statistical results for the distribution of news sources in Chinese and English newspapers  8.4 Corpus classification of Chinese and English newspapers  8.5 Frequency of the three types of news sources in Chinese and English newspapers  8.6 Average number of sources per 10,000 words in Chinese and English newspapers  8.7 Average number of each type of news source per 10,000 words in Chinese and English newspapers 

128 133 134 135 136 136 137 147 151 151 152 158 160 163 170 170 174 174 175 190 190 191 191

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List of tables  ix 8.8 Source structure of ‘A Fight over Keeping Boards in the Boardwalk’  8.9 Source structure of ‘General Secretary Hu Jintao Met the National Advanced Grassroots Party Organisations’  9.1 Distribution of the three reporting modes in the Chinese newspapers  9.2 Distribution of the three reporting modes in the British/​American newspapers  9.3 Frequency and proportion of reporting modes in the two groups of newspapers  9.4 Distribution of the three types of sources in the Chinese news reports  9.5 Distribution of the three types of sources in the British/​American news reports  9.6 Frequency and proportion of the three sources of news in the two groups of newspapers  9.7 Reporting verbs and their frequency of occurrence (in order of the number of occurrences in Chinese media reports)  9.8 Comparison of direct speech content in the two groups of media reports  9.9 Number and proportion of each reporting mode in the hard news reports of the two newspapers  9.10 Number and proportion of each reporting mode in the domestic hard news reports of both newspapers  9.11 Number and proportion of each reporting mode in the international hard news reports of both newspapers  9.12 Statistical distribution of the three types of news sources 

202 205 210 211 211 213 214 214 216 217 219 219 219 225

1  Introduction

Reported speech is a basic form of human language. When people wish to convey something that has happened in the past, something that is currently happening or perhaps something that may occur in the future, either in their own words or the words of others, this can be achieved through the use of reported speech. Most languages we know seem to have these devices in one form or other, and even languages which are not too well-​equipped, somehow seem to make do with whatever devices they have, mostly relying on context features… reported speech is a universal of human action. (Haberland, 1986: 219) The reporting of speech has long been studied in the West, but from the perspective of modern discourse analysis, such research has two main limitations. First, in terms of the research focus, this is currently primarily limited to the phenomenon of reported speech in literary works (see Semino and Short, 2004: 4; Haakana, 2007: 151). Second, as current studies emphasise the analysis of form and authenticity, the study of discourse and pragmatic functions has largely been ignored (see Holt and Clift, 2007:  3). Contemporary discourse researchers are aware of these limitations and have made attempts to remedy this situation. For example, both Semino and Short (2004) and Couper-​Kuhlen (2007) believe that the study of reported speech should break away from the traditional framework, and instead shift towards finding a broader discourse-​pragmatic based interpretation of the form and function of reported speech in different genres. The purpose of this study is to investigate the language and pragmatic features of reported speech in the news discourse of Chinese and English newspapers and to perform a comparative analysis of their discourse/​pragmatic functions and the ways reporters use reported speech to convey their views effectively.

1.1  Research content When addressing the development of quotation research, Lucy (1993: 28–​29) highlights that: 1) we must describe the forms of reported speech; 2) we must

2 Introduction clarify the function of reported speech; 3)  we must explore the limitations of reported speech; and 4) we must explain the innovative usage of reported speech. Using the above as a guide, we will focus primarily on the following four aspects of reported speech in the news discourse of Chinese and English newspapers: a) The classification of Chinese and English reported speech and the distribution of these categories in newspaper reports: Reported speech has various forms and complex functions. We will first establish and evaluate the traditional classification of reported speech, and then form a new category for Chinese and English newspaper reports based on our research objectives. The distribution, nature and function of reported speech vary according to the type of discourse. This is not only manifested in the extensive genre of news discourse and other genres (for example, the source of reported speech in literary discourse is often fictitious, while the authenticity of the source in news reports is paramount), but is also reflected in subcategories of the news genre. (for instance, free direct speech and free indirect speech often appear in news features, but rarely in the reporting of news events). b) The form and function of Chinese and English reported speech in different news categories and contexts: The form and function of reported speech, rather than remaining the same, change according to the content and purpose of the report. The specific effect of a certain report in a particular news discourse often depends on the choice of other reporting modes in that context. For example, it is generally believed that the verb tense used in the reported speech (i.e., clause) in indirect speech is dominated by the verb tense in the matrix clause (i.e., main sentence). But, in fact, the reporter, based on his perspective, often violates this rule by using his speaking time as a reference to achieve a certain communicative effect (see Sakita, 2002). c) Dialogical analysis of Chinese and English reported speech and news discourse: Tannen (1986:  311) has referred to the reported speech as ‘constructed dialogue’ because, based on investigations into the dialogue used in story-​telling or conversations, as well as the capacity of the human memory, the majority of so-​called reported speech is not the exact words that are spoken, but more closely resembles the dialogue created by playwrights and novelists. Once speech is transplanted from the original context to another context, even if it is entirely and accurately quoted, its nature still changes. Therefore, the reported words are actually dialogues and, to be precise, reconstructed dialogues, which are the narrator’s creation, and the narrator bears all the responsibilities and interpretation rights. As illustrated by the aforementioned view held by Tannen, reported speech is an essential aspect of discourse intertextuality. It plays a vital role in constructing discourse dialogue, and its role varies depending on the type of news discourse. For example, the reporting of news events and speeches can be divided into monologues and dialogues according

Introduction  3 to their dialogicality. In Chinese newspapers, the report of an official discourse generally has a relatively higher level of monologicality; such a monological news event is typically shorter in length, to the point and rarely has any comments. In a dialogical news event and some reported discourses, the reporter narrates and discusses by appropriately quoting others and adding his comments. d) Socio-​pragmatic interpretation of reported speech in the news discourse of Chinese and English newspapers: The similarities, differences and changes in the form and function of reported speech in Chinese and English news discourse ultimately need to be explained by considering the different socio-​economic cultures. For example, ‘pure quotation’ and ‘direct speech’ appear more frequently in Chinese news discourse than in English news discourse, the reasons for which are rooted in the different cultural traditions and current social situations of both cultures. Besides, the indirect speech-​reporting method is widely used in Chinese news reports, which is ultimately determined by China’s cultural traditions and the social functions of the modern mass media. To achieve the above research goals, we have built a corresponding Chinese and English newspaper corpus to examine the similarities and differences between the reported speech used in Chinese and English newspapers from the multiple aspects of vocabulary, syntax, text and pragmatics. Being a cross-​ language study and, in essence, an interdisciplinary study, it requires comprehensive analysis and discussion from several different perspectives such as communication, political science and critical discourse analysis.

1.2  The significance of this research Habermas (1989) believes that, with the rise of capitalism, a middle zone, or ‘public sphere’, emerged between the state system and the ‘private sphere’. In a modern society based on public opinion, the news media play an increasingly important role in this public domain. Speech reporting is key to enhancing the dialogicality of texts (see Haakana, 2007), particularly in news reports. As the role of public opinion in modern society becomes increasingly more influential, a vital function and social responsibility of news media is to understand and guide public opinion through the use of dialogue. To effectively strengthen its role as a form of news media, news reports need to consider how they can increase dialogicality, how they are relevant to people’s lives and how they can strengthen communication channels with people, while various types of reported speech are essential for constructing a conversational news text. Specifically, the practical and social significance of this study is reflected in the following four aspects: First, this study will encourage Chinese discourse researchers to devote more attention to the dynamic diversity of texts. Reported speech is a common phenomenon in communication, be it daily conversation or written text; both

4 Introduction have large amounts of ‘other’ speech. This study compares the languages of Chinese and English. On the one hand, it can explain the ideological significance of news discourse as a public discourse. On the other hand, it provides a deeper understanding of reported speech in news reports. As a language form, reported speech not only contains two speech forms and contexts, but also reflects the system and essence of communication, society and cognition. Reported speech illustrates various characteristics of verbal communication, such as the ‘dialogic nature’ of the language it represents. Bakhtin (1981) and Voloshinov (1973) believe that the ‘polyphonic’ feature of reported speech is particularly important. Voloshinov (1973: 117) emphasises that the real unit of language ‘is not the individual, isolated and monologic utterance, but the interaction of at least two utterances -​in a word, dialogue’. He believes that the analysis of reported speech helps to show the conversational nature of language:  ‘The productive study of dialogue presupposes, however, a more profound investigation of the forms used in reported speech, since these forms reflect basic and constant tendencies in the active reception of other speakers’ speech, and it is this reception, after all, that is fundamental also for dialogue’ (Voloshinov, 1973:  117). Moreover, the study of reported speech, a product of society, is related to the study of social dynamics. Reported speech is related to society, and there is no abstract personality, ‘no person who is independent of society and independent of objective economic conditions. Human personality, only when it is a part of society as a whole, is realistic from a historical perspective, and productive from a cultural point of view’ (Todorov, 2001: 215). The study of reported speech helps us to further understand the sociological nature behind these phenomena. Besides, the study of reported speech also helps to reveal the complex cognitive mechanisms of human beings, including perception, storage, recall and verbalisation (Chafe, 1977). Finally, it can further enrich the different perspectives on reported speech. For example, anthropologists use reported speech as a social tool, while stylisticians have studied the importance of reported speech for narratology (Feldman et al., 1990). Linguists focus on the syntactic transformation between the methods used to report speech, including the transitions between direct speech and indirect speech, as well as the backward movement of tense and demonstrative words. The most recent pragmatic perspective focuses on the communicative and interactive functions of language, which is a continuation of Voloshinov’s (1973: 119) point of view on reported speech and the reporting context: ‘virtually divorcing the reported speech from the reporting context’ will hinder the understanding of its dynamic relationship. Second, the combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches adopted in this study, which makes use of a real corpus and employs a corpus-​ based methodology, can further verify the feasibility of combining critical linguistics and corpus technology. Critical discourse analysis has been fruitful in revealing the relationship between language and ideology, but has also been the recipient of some criticism, with some scholars questioning this approach. Of these, Fowler (1996:  8–​12), one of the founders of critical linguistics,

Introduction  5 points out that the main problem associated with critical linguistics (CL) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) is that the analysis they present is ‘fragmentary’, ‘exemplificatory’ and ‘uncontrolled’  –​that is, the problem associated with CLA and CDA is that these two approaches are ‘inexplicit’ in corpus collection and discourse analysis. Its corpus is often limited to ‘fragments’ of the text, and the investigation is suspected of being ‘circular’. In these controversies, Stubbs (1997: 107) indicates that very few CL and CDA scholars compare the features that they find in the text with the ‘norm’ in a language, especially when they want to draw conclusions about different language choices; the corpus used in CL and CDA is not really ‘representative’ because only a small amount of text is used for analysis and the selected examples are rarely used in real life. Although many scholars have put forward a series of criticisms, they have also provided some constructive opinions, such as proposing that ‘by using a large corpus as a basis upon which to draw reliable conclusions’, critical discourse analysis can be strengthened. From the perspective of the development of critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics has brought new vitality and has also provided us with a new perspective from which to study the reporting of speech. Third, this study can further enrich comparative linguistics by comparing and analysing reported speech in English and Chinese. Contrastive analysis is an important means by which to study language. As Yuanren Zhao, a Chinese linguist, once said, ‘The so-​called linguistic theory is the scientific conclusion drawn by the comprehensive comparative analysis of the languages of various nationalities in the world’. Revealing the laws that are common or specific to the national language/​other languages by studying the languages of other countries or by comparatively analysing different languages is an endeavour that has high academic and practical value. Besides, some problems still exist in the development of contrastive studies between English and Chinese. For example, the theoretical comparison of Chinese and English has not yet received sufficient attention; the quantitative comparative study of the micro-​ individual-​level systems of English and Chinese is insufficient; the application of comparative studies lacks breadth and depth. This research is faced with two main difficulties:  the study of reported speech in Chinese is somewhat lacking, with much disagreement in theory and categorisation, and few significant works exist; the comparative study of reported speech in English and Chinese is still very much a blank sheet with little material for direct reference. Due to the constraints imposed by these problems, although this study has many shortcomings, it makes a meaningful contribution to the comparison of Chinese and English. Fourth, in terms of application, this research will help news producers and consumers in China improve their capacity to produce and understand news reports, thereby enhancing their critical thinking and reading ability. From the perspective of communication studies, the success of external publicity largely depends on how its information has been disseminated. The American communication pioneer Lasswell (1948) proposes the ‘five elements

6 Introduction of communication’ i.e., the ‘five-​W model’, namely ‘who → says what → in which channel → to whom → with what effect’, in other words, the main body of the communication, the content of the communication, the communication channels, the communication objects and the communication effects. In fact, how China communicates externally with other countries is far removed from what would be expected of a rapidly rising world power. This study helps to enhance the mutual understanding between China and foreign countries, improve the effectiveness of communication and, as a consequence, avoid any misunderstanding. It has many practical applications, as well as contemporary significance.

1.3  Corpus and method This study will use a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, with both case studies in specific contexts and statistical analyses based on corpora of various sizes. The ultimate goal is to reflect on, as comprehensively as possible, the similarities and differences in reported speech in the news discourse of Chinese and English newspapers. In the analysis of news discourse, the size of the corpus has always been a controversial issue, but we believe that this is dependent on what the analyst aims to achieve. Van Dijk (1988b) analyses 700 news reports from 138 newspapers in 99 countries, and he provides a summary of the schematic features (news schemata) and macrorules of the news stories, which has subsequently had a considerable impact on the analysis of news texts. However, a more frequently used approach is to analyse either a few articles or a dozen (or dozens) of articles when investigating a specific problem or issue. For our analysis, we will select news reports from more than ten newspapers in different historical periods from China, the United States and the United Kingdom to be the source of our corpus, which will enable us to examine the commonality and individuality of the texts and the pragmatic functions of reported speech in Chinese and English newspapers. These newspapers include People’s Daily, Guangming Daily, China Youth Daily, Xinhua Daily, Modern Express, Nanjing Morning News, China Daily, Global Times, Financial Times, The New York Times, Business Week and The Washington Post, a combination of six Chinese and six English newspapers with influential national or even global newspapers as well as local newspapers. The analysis will focus simultaneously on development along both the diachronic and synchronic axes, not only to analyse the use of reported speech in certain historical periods, but also to analyse how reported speech is used when covering specific events. We will use a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Under the guidance of textual pragmatics and journalism, we will establish an original corpus, use corpus linguistics methods and tools to mark the corpus, utilise the context search function of software such as WordSmith and then use various types of reported speech markers as search keywords to assess the use of reported speech in news texts in the corpus to investigate the distribution

Introduction  7 and change in the reported speech in these newspapers. Furthermore, we will perform an objective analysis of the similarities and differences in the discourse/​pragmatic functions of various types of reported speech in the news reports of Chinese and English newspapers, as well as their interactions and impact, to draw scientific conclusions. In particular, our analysis will emphasise the dynamic relationship that exists between reported speech and the reporting context or the reporter’s discourse, and will attempt to answer the following specific questions: 1) To what extent are reported speech and the reporter’s discourse clearly defined –​that is, to what extent does the reporter integrate and separate the voice of the reported speech and his voice? 2) To what extent does the reporting context dominate or affect the understanding of reported speech? 3) To what extent does the reported speech express the interpersonal function and significance of the original utterance? 4) How do the various forms of reported speech from the different sources complement and interact with one another depending on the purpose of the report? We will examine the above dynamic relationship from three aspects, namely vocabulary, syntax and discourse:  1) regarding vocabulary, we will analyse reporting verbs and their modifiers, modal words, etc.; 2) regarding syntax, we will analyse person, tense and voice; and 3) regarding discourse, we will examine the source of the information, the jurisdiction of the reporting verbs, the proportion and distribution of each reporting mode and the dynamic interrelationship and discourse functions that exist between them.

1.4  Brief introduction to each chapter This book consists of ten chapters. Based on the theoretical definition and classification of reported speech (Chapters  1 and 2) and a brief review of previous research (Chapter  3), Chapter  4 investigates reported speech in the news headlines of Chinese newspapers and summarises its unique form and function. We believe that traditional definitions cannot be relied upon when trying to understand the various forms of reported speech. Instead, they should be treated as multiple typical forms based on prototype theory. The core areas of the various forms are clear enough, but the boundaries between them are rather fuzzy. In actual language use, the various typical forms will undergo changes by which the reporter achieves various rhetorical effects and fulfils various communicative purposes. Beginning at Chapter 5, we deploy a relatively large-​scale, self-​built corpus to conduct a more in-​depth and detailed quantitative and qualitative comparative study of the reported speech in Chinese and English newspaper texts from the three perspectives of reporting modes, reporting verbs and information sources, which results in

8 Introduction some meaningful discoveries. In Chapters 5–​8, we first analyse a small-​scale corpus taken from several different newspapers, and thus achieve a preliminary comparative description and summary of the forms and functions of reporting modes, sources and reporting verbs. We then conduct a comparative investigation of a large-​scale corpus taken from the People’s Daily and The New York Times to verify and supplement the findings and conclusions obtained from the other corpora. Chapter  9 provides a more in-​depth and specific discussion of reported speech. By taking the particular genre of news discourse as the focus of our investigation, we first comprehensively examine the reported speech in news reports on the Chinese economy in Chinese and English newspapers by considering the reported modes, sources and reporting verbs, and then analyse indirect discourse with temporal discontinuity in ‘hard news’ in China Daily and The Washington Post. We believe that the differences discovered between these two publications are a result of their news values and their social, political and cultural traditions. Chapter  10, the conclusion, reviews and summarises the purpose, methods and main findings of this study, and a number of its shortcomings are highlighted.

2  Introduction to reported speech

Reported speech is a universal language phenomenon and plays a crucial role in the communication process. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato distinguished between two forms of discourse in his dialogue The Republic:  diegesis and mimesis. Since then, scholars in various fields have widely researched this phenomenon from a number of different perspectives. Traditional linguistics is concerned with the conversion rules between direct speech (DS) and indirect speech (IS). It stops at the level of syntax and semantics and is limited primarily to grammatical description. Being rather simplistic in nature, this method is unable to provide a comprehensive explanation for the complex phenomenon of speech reporting. During the 1980s, researchers in various fields began to pay more attention to the study of rhetoric and pragmatic functions, and since then have achieved some remarkable results. The reporting of speech has invariably been a topic of common concern for a number of different disciplines, with each discipline studying this phenomenon according to its own theories, research aims and methodologies.

2.1  Reported speech as reflexive language The most fundamental feature of reported speech is its reflexivity; that is, people use language to refer to language itself. Around the globe, people use speech to talk about speech and words to talk about words. Linguists call this phenomenon the ‘reflexive use of language’ and the words used are ‘reflexive language’. There are different types of reflexive language. First, there are the grammar rules and uses, for example: ( 1) Many languages have the distinction of ‘case’. (2) ‘Panda’ is composed of two words in Mandarin Chinese. (3) In Mandarin, we should say ‘go home’, not ‘home away’.1 These three sentences are all examples of Chinese reflexive usage. Second, in every language, there are some demonstrative forms whose reference and meaning change according to the context, such as demonstratives in Chinese (this/​that, these/​those, now/​then), or pronouns and proper nouns;

10  Introduction to reported speech in many languages (such as English) tense is also a form of demonstrative. Such words or forms index a particular aspect of a specific speech activity and use it as part of its meaning. In this sense, these words and forms are reflexive language. Third, there exist various expressions in each language to help guide or instruct the recipient’s understanding of words, such as ‘to sum up’, ‘frankly’, ‘all in all’ and so on. These expressions are also reflexive language. Lastly, speech reporting is also reflexive language and is the focus of the current research. In Bakhtin’s view, reported speech is ‘speech within speech, utterance within utterance’ and ‘speech about speech, utterance about utterance’ (Volosinov, 1973: 115). Traditionally, three approaches to the study of reflexive language have been adopted:  the logical-​linguistic approach, the semiotic-​functional approach and the literary-​stylistic approach. Of these, the semiotic-​functional approach is primarily based on the theory of communication and information. This approach explores the relationship between symbolic structures and symbolic events and pays little attention to speech reporting. Therefore, to set the stage for a discussion on the theory of speech reporting and the methods used, we will briefly introduce below only the logical-​linguistic and literary stylistic approaches. The logical-​linguistic approach focuses primarily on the first and final types of reflexive language mentioned above. For traditional philosophers and linguists, the first function of natural language refers to the nonverbal material world. However, in examples such as ‘Xiong Mao (panda) consists of two words’, language is used to refer to the language itself; ‘Xiong Mao (panda)’ does not refer to an actual animal, but instead refers to the word itself, that is, its name. This reflexive use of language is known as ‘mention’, that is, the language is used to mention itself. In the sentence ‘Xiong Mao (panda) is very adorable’, ‘Xiong Mao (panda)’ refers to an actual animal, and is therefore the regular use of language. Thus, we can say that the word is under ‘use’. Language which is used to refer to itself is known as ‘metalanguage’, while language which is used in the regular way is known as ‘object language’. Logicians and language philosophers are interested in reported speech mainly because this phenomenon is a deviation from the normal function of language (referring to reality), and various forms of reported speech pose a challenge when judging the truth value of sentences. For example: ( 4)  a.  Mary said, ‘Bring that pig here’. b.  Mary said, ‘Bring that hog here’. In the above two sentences, pig and hog refer to the same animal. Therefore, do these two sentences have the same truth value? Most logicians and language philosophers will consider them to be different for the following reason. By convention, if the speaker chooses to directly quote another person, then he/​she promises to faithfully quote the original utterance verbatim. Therefore,

Introduction to reported speech  11 only one of the above sentences, either (4a) or (4b), meets this condition. Indirect speech can also lead to similar problems. It is often difficult for people to judge the extent to which indirect forms of reported speech are faithful to the form and/​or content of the original utterance. Therefore, Quine (1976) distinguishes between de dicto interpretation and de re interpretation of indirect speech. The former assumes that the reporter is more or less faithful to the form of the original utterance and only makes necessary grammatical changes. The latter implies that the reporter’s main aim is to convey the content of the original statement. In the logical-​ linguistic approach, the excessive attention paid to the true proposition or the truth conditions of the proposition limits the scope of research that can be undertaken on reflexive language because it only considers language to be a carrier of knowledge about the world composed of statements or true propositions. It focuses on the discussion and algorithm of the reference or descriptive function of language, and it rarely discusses any other functions of utterances as a human activity. Therefore, this method is unable to provide an opinion on the function and importance of speech in social and psychological life. The literary-​stylistic approach does not consider the truth value of a sentence, unlike the logical-​linguistic approach described above, nor does it pay attention to the necessary conditions required for verbal communication, unlike the semiotic-​functional approach. It focuses primarily on the aesthetic value of different organisational structures, speech reporting and utterance description methods, the artistic effects produced by these different methods and the intention or purpose of producing such effects. For example, direct speech and indirect speech, as two forms of speech reporting, have many obvious or not so obvious differences in structure and function. The direct form imitates or presents the reported speech event from the perspective of the person being reported or the original discourse situation. In contrast, the indirect form analyses or interprets the reported speech event from the perspective of the person who is reporting on the current reporting event. Since direct speech adopts the situation perspective frame of the original discourse (that is, the uttered discourse) event, it does not necessarily have any formal connection with the current reported event. Direct speech clearly states that the discourse event should be faithfully presented, so the reported speech intentionally highlights the formal features of the original utterance, while at the same time reproducing the original content. For example, some discourse phenomena (such as incomplete sentences, imperative sentences, exclamatory sentences, salutations, elements belonging to different languages, etc.) are inconceivable in indirect speech, but can be presented to the recipient of the current utterance through direct speech. Unlike direct speech, indirect speech adopts the situation perspective frame of the current discourse event, and the reported speech is related to the current speech event. Therefore, indirect speech highlights the relevant content of the original utterance, and the similarity with the original utterance in form can either be substantial or minimal.

12  Introduction to reported speech In addition to direct speech and indirect speech, various other forms of reporting also exist. For example, Volosinov (1973: 129–​159) proposes ‘quasi-​ direct discourse’, also known as ‘free indirect style’ or ‘represented speech and thought’. Consider the following examples: ( 5)  a.  John said ‘Oh, am I tired’. (direct) b.  John said (that) he was tired. (indirect) c.  John said: oh was he tired. (quasi-​direct) The order of quasi-​direct discourse and the exclamatory elements which it contains are similar to direct speech, but the tense and pronouns used are similar to indirect speech. In this sense, quasi-​direct speech is often regarded to be a mixture of direct and indirect speech. Unfortunately, however, things are not that simple. For example, in this quasi-​direct form, whose perspective is being expressed? We can say with certainty that the first example above expresses John’s perspective, the second example expresses the view of the reporter, but the third example appears to be John reporting his own words from his own perspective, but not by using first person pronouns nor the present tense. It can be seen that the literary-​stylistic approach is primarily concerned with how direct and indirect forms of reported speech are used interchangeably to produce use effects and aesthetic effects, particularly the contrastive effect produced by rotational change between the narration of the work and the perspectives of the characters in the work. Bakhtin states that there is a connection between the authority of the discourse and direct speech or ‘word-​by-​word quotation’, noting that ‘the stronger the feeling of hierarchical eminence in another’s utterance, the more sharply defined will its boundaries be, and the less accessible will it be to penetration by retorting and commenting tendencies from outside’ (Volosinov, 1973: 123). This undoubtedly underestimates the speaker’s creativity in political discourses when reporting the words of the authorities. Firstly, citing another person’s words in a specific context helps to create concrete and effective rhetorical effects. Politicians quote the words of others to serve their own communicative intentions. Secondly, using direct speech instead of indirect speech, at least on the surface, demonstrates the need for objective truth and respect for the authorities. However, its true intention is often to use the original utterance of an authority to support the legitimacy or authority of a person’s own words or thoughts. Citing proverbs, the classics, etc. has a similar effect to quoting the utterances of celebrities or the authorities. In short, direct speech often performs the function of expressing emotions, and is more real, vivid and authoritative; indirect speech often fully expresses the reader’s understanding of the original discourse events (such as related motivations and intentions), and therefore can indicate more clearly the reason or purpose for the speech reporting. However, reporters often use different methods of speech reporting to achieve various pragmatic aims. For example,

Introduction to reported speech  13 the use of direct speech can make a point of view appear more authoritative, rather than just being the reporter’s personal opinion; the use of indirect speech enables the reporter to ignore or obscure features or meanings in the original language that he/​she does not want to present. Research on reported speech generally involves the following three aspects: reporting modes, reporting verbs and news sources. Our research will consider these same three aspects. First, we will examine the reporting mode.

2.2  Reporting modes The classification used for reported speech is very often the same as that used for reporting mode. When discussing the literary-​stylistic approach to reflexive language research, we mentioned three types of reported speech (that is, direct speech, indirect speech and free indirect speech) distinguished by the reporting mode; the speech reporting mode is, however, much more than these three forms. With regard to the reporting mode, different classifications have been advanced in different fields of language research. In the fields of philosophy and language philosophy, Cappelen and Lepore (1997) believe that quotations can be divided into at least four categories. In addition to direct and indirect speech, they divide quotations into ‘pure quotations’ and ‘mixed quotations’, for example: ( 6) ‘Life is difficult to understand’ is a sentence. (7) Alice said life ‘is difficult to understand’. Example (6) is a pure quotation, the speaker is not quoting another person’s words, only discussing a particular language expression. On the other hand, example (7)  is a mixed quotation, that is, a mixture of direct and indirect forms, and shows that in reporting what Alice said, some of the original utterance is mentioned. The mixed quotations of Cappelen and Lepore are similar to the ‘closed quotations’ and ‘open quotations’ distinguished by Recanati (2001). In Recanati’s classification, closed quotations are as follows: ( 8) ‘Muscle’ rhymes with ‘bustle’. (9) ‘Comment-​allez vous?’ is a question in French. (10) These are not ‘I really should’ radishes… . Recanati (2001:  649) believes that closed quotation ‘serves as a singular term, filling a slot in the sentence’. For example, the quotations in examples (8) and (9) perform a similar function to a noun occupying the subject position (­examples  8 and 9)  and the (preposition) object position (­example  8). In example (10) the quotation is equivalent to an adjective occupying the attribute position. Whether in syntax or semantics, closed quotations appear in the sentence as a whole with an internal structure that cannot be analysed

14  Introduction to reported speech any further. Therefore, regardless of the part of speech or structure of the closed quotation forms, its syntactic function is determined by its position in the sentence. For example, the quoted section in example (10) is a sentence according to its internal structure, but acts as the preposition of ‘radishes’. Similarly, closed quotations do not have to match the rest of the sentence in terms of form and phonetic/​phoneme structure. For example, the quotation in example (9) is in French, while the rest of the sentence is in English. As shown in example (7), an open quotation performs the same syntactic function in the entire sentence as when it is not used as a quotation. An open quotation maintains its analysability of the internal semantic and syntactic features, and the quotation completes normal semantic and syntactic functions in the sentence in which it appears. Open quotations are particularly common in academic writing, and generally express agreement with the thoughts being expressed in the quoted sections. Recanati calls these ‘cumulative’ open quotations because the meaning of the quotation is maintained and constitutes part of the meaning of the entire discourse or sentence. In contrast, a ‘non-​cumulative’ open quotation is shown in ­example 11 below: (11) [T]‌his remarkable piece of ‘art’ consists of a large canvas covered with mud and old bus transfers. (Abbott, 2005: 16) The speaker in example (11) holds a reserved attitude towards what ‘art’ refers to here. Recanati calls such open quotations ‘non-​cumulative’ because the quoter’s intention is to maintain a certain distance from the meaning being expressed in the quotation. This type of quotation is also known as a ‘scare quote’, that is, the quoter directs the reader’s attention to the words that he has chosen for a variety of reasons. For example, a textbook editor might use a scare quote to imply that ‘this is a technical term, don’t forget it’, a scholar might use one to mean that ‘the language here is not rigorous, I have realized that’ and people who believe they are well educated might use a scare quote to mean ‘this is slang, I don’t approve it’ (Saka, 2005: 192). Saka points out that, when warning readers for teaching, cautionary or distance keeping purposes, the reporter will use scare quotes (ibid). De Brabanter (2005) calls open quotations ‘hybrid quotations’, which are mixed quotations according to Cappelen and Lepore’s classification, but he defines them in terms of ‘used’ and ‘mentioned’: a hybrid quotation refers to a word or phrase that is used and mentioned at the same time. In example (7), ‘is difficult to understand’ is used on the one hand (as a predicate), and, on the other hand, is mentioned, indicating that these are the words that Alice originally used. However, in examples (8), (9)  and (10), words like ‘Muscle’, ‘bustle’, ‘Comment-​allez vous?’, and ‘I really should’ are simply mentioned, and are therefore ‘reflexive’, referring to themselves respectively. De Brabanter divides hybrid quotations into mixed quotations and scare quotes.

Introduction to reported speech  15 If the above classification of quotations is from a philosophical and semantic perspective, then Leech and Short’s classification of quotations is from the perspective of stylistics and pragmatics and is more suitable for our analytical study of reported speech in news discourse. Leech and Short (1981) distinguish five forms of reported speech: in addition to DS and IS, they consider free direct speech (FDS), free indirect speech (FIS) and the narrative report of speech acts (NRSA). FDS is a variation of direct speech and is the form left after removing the quotation marks and/​or its leading sentence from the DS. FIS is the form left after removing the leading sentence of the IS, and ‘its characteristic features in the novel are almost always the presence of third-​person pronouns and past tense’ (Leech and Short, 1981: 325). NRSA is neither limited to the form of the original discourse nor its content, but only reports the speech acts carried out by the person who is being reported. Semino and Short (2004) extend Leech and Short’s classification by adding one further category: the narrator’s representation of voice (NRV). Consider the following examples: (12) “Don’t you love Barrie’s plays?” she asked. “I’m so fond of them”. She talked on. Rampion made no comment. (Semino and Short, 2004: 43) (13) We spoke to vice madam Michaela Hamilton from Bullwell, Notts, who arranged girls for a Hudson orgy at the Sanam curry house in Stoke. (ibid) Although the italicised words in the above examples refer to someone’s speech act, unlike the NRSA category in Leech and Short’s classification, they do not clarify the type of speech act the speaker is performing, and do not explain the illocutionary force of the speech. Compared with other reporting modes, NRV appears relatively less frequently. Semino and Short (2004: 44) surmise that this may be because the reporter’s control or involvement in this reporting mode is the most obvious, and the distance between the reader and the original reported discourse is also the greatest. Yamashita (1998) divides speech reporting (which he calls ‘discourse representation’) into three categories: direct discourse representation, indirect discourse representation and narrative speech act (which is equivalent to Leech and Short’s NRSA). The first category is further divided into direct discourse, slipping direct discourse (slipping from indirect discourse to direct discourse) and free direct discourse, and the second category is further divided into indirect discourse and free indirect discourse. Although the terminology used is different, Yamashita’s (1998) classification is similar to Leech and Short’s classification. This work will primarily use this analytical framework with a discourse-​pragmatic perspective. From the perspective of discourse pragmatics, Hickmann (1993) also divides reported speech into explicit and nonexplicit. Explicit reported speech has a framing clause, for example, he said to her, he asked her. The framing

16  Introduction to reported speech clause in the explicit reported speech anchors the content reported in S’ (the reported situation) into the narration of S (current narrative situation). This anchoring enables the addressee to understand various components of the reported speech, particularly different indexical elements (such as personal pronouns and words representing time and space) by placing them in the context of the original discourse. The framing clause draws a clear distinction between the reporting speech and the reported speech, distinguishing the current narrative situation (S) from the reported situation (S’). For example, consider the following (14b): (14)  a. I have to move out of my hotel room by noon today. Can I stay here and sleep in your living room until tomorrow? b.  John showed up at Mary’s place yesterday. He said to her, “I have to move out of my hotel room by noon today. Can I stay here and sleep in your living room until tomorrow?” (Hickmann, 1993: 64) In keeping with the direct reporting mode, the indirect reporting mode also contains a framing clause, which draws a clear distinction between the reporting speech and the reported speech. However, unlike the direct reporting mode, the choice of indexical elements in the indirect reporting mode does not refer to the context of the original discourse, but to the context of the reporting context or the current narrative context. For example: (15) John showed up at Mary’s place yesterday. He said to her that he had to move out of his hotel room by noon and he asked her if he could stay at her place and sleep in her living room until tomorrow. (Hickmann, 1993: 64) Although both direct and indirect speech explicitly indicate reported speech, they draw different boundaries between the reporting speech and the reported speech. Direct speech presents the discourse events as a whole, that is, it not only reproduces the content of the original discourse, but also presents the original way of expression. In contrast, indirect speech focuses on the propositional content expressed by the original language. The mode of expression and various other semantic components (such as indexical elements) are dissolved, to some extent, in the narrative discourse or reporting discourse. In this way, indirect speech cannot contain nonreferential elements (such as ‘Hello’ and ‘Great’ in English, ‘Hi’ and ‘Ah’ in Chinese; these are primarily components of expression). Besides, to a large extent, the indirect reporting mode allows for the intervention of the reporter (Hickmann, 1993: 65–​66). In implicit reported speech, narrators do not need to refer to words when reporting speech events. For example, they can use words that express

Introduction to reported speech  17 propositional attitudes such as think, want and know instead of speech act verbs. Such verbs focus on the inner state or processes of the reporter, such as thoughts, plans and emotions. This is known as thought representations. For example: (16) John thought that it would rain today. Other implicit reporting modes are as follows: ( 17) I’m really depressed. (18) John just called me. He’s really depressed (*but I don’t believe him). (19) John just called me. He says that he’s really depressed (but I  don’t believe him). Only in example (19) can the reporter question the authenticity of John’s words. Bakhtin uses the concept of ‘polyphony’ to explain this reporting phenomenon, and he believes that various forms of reported speech can form a continuum depending on the degree to which the voices of the reporter and the reported person are separated or mixed together. At one extreme is direct speech which clearly separates both voices, while at the other extreme is mixed speech, as in example (18). Many of our daily words are similar to those used in example (18). This is nonexplicit reporting, in which ‘John just called me’ can be regarded as a guiding sentence. There are many forms of this type of reported speech in Chinese. For example: ( 20) Watching the pregnant woman get in the car, everyone sits still. An 8-​year-​old girl stands up:  Auntie, sit down. (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) (21) There are busy people in the subway. Whoever suffers the most grievances will win the prize. (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) (22) Many big-​name projects are attracted. Will the hot springs be enough in the future? Don’t worry, Tangshan Hot Spring “has potential to be tapped” (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) The so-​called descriptive mode of thought reporting is the least clear or most implicit way of reporting. ‘Think’ is generally used to indicate that a false belief is held by the reported person. Wynne et  al. (1998) and Short et  al. (1996) classify speech reporting in writing into three types: ‘narrator’s report of voice’ (NV), ‘narrator’s report of writing’ (NW) and ‘narration of internal states’ (NI). ‘Narrator’s report of voice’ is verbally shorter than the narrative report of speech acts (NRSA), and

18  Introduction to reported speech only indicates to the reader that a certain verbal event has occurred, without mentioning the speech act that has been performed, for example: (23) I saw the Chief Constable again on 15 May in his office and we continued our conversation. (Wynne et al., 1998: 241–​242) ‘Narrator’s report of writing’ is used primarily to report written words that occur mainly in written format, such as letters and diaries; for example: (24) For while I was convalescent in the country, he wrote to me frequently; I still have his letters. (Curriculum Vitae, Muriel Spark) ‘Narration of internal states’ refers primarily to the narrator’s description of the protagonist’s psychological and emotional states in the written work, for example: (25) For a moment she didn’t know where she was. (Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, p. 60) In addition, Wynne et al. (1998) and Short et al. (1996) propose a subcategory of NRSA (the narrative representation of speech acts). They find that, in many cases, the reporter mentions some details of the original discourse, beside reporting the speech act that has been carried out. They call this form of reporting the ‘narrator’s representation of speech act with topic’ (NRSAp). For example: (26) Russian liberals, including some of Mr. Yeltsin’s closest former allies such as the former prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, have denounced military action as a threat not only to lives in Chechnya but to Russia’s fledgling democracy. (The Independent, 12 December 1994) The italicised part of example (26) not only reports the speech acts carried out by Yegor Gaidar, but also provides some content for his words. This type of NRSA is very common in news discourse, probably for two main reasons: news reports are generally both concise and truthful (see Semino and Short, 2004: 53).

2.3  Reporting verbs Volosinov (1973) indicates that the meaning of reported speech can only be deduced by referring to the context in which it takes place. The main factors that can influence a reader’s understanding and evaluation of reported speech in news reports include: the identity of the quoted person, the object of his/​ her discourse and the type of verbs used by the reporter when describing the reported speech. Reporting verbs form the most direct context of the quotation,

Introduction to reported speech  19 and have the function of predicting and controlling its understanding; the choice of reporting verb can often precisely and clearly indicate the function of the reported speech that follows. For example, in comparison with ‘say’ in English, ‘report’ highlights the information-​ providing function of the reported speech as indicated in examples (27) and (28) below: ( 27) Sally reported that she ran into a wall with her car. (28) Sally said that she ran into a wall with her car. (Lucy, 1993: 92) In fact, the entire reporting speech, with verbs and modifiers at its core, highlights the pragmatic colours and effects of the reported speech (see Lucy, 1993: 97). To date, research on reporting verbs has focused on two main areas, namely news discourse and academic texts, each having a different research aim and classification criteria. Following Austin’s early speech act theory, Bell (1991), in a news report he analyses, adopts the term ‘news performatives’ for all reporting verbs (with the exception of ‘say’, ‘tell’ and ‘according to’), including ‘announce’, ‘declare’, ‘refuse’, ‘threaten’, ‘insist’ and ‘denounce’. These news performatives are different from ‘say’, ‘tell’ and ‘according to’ in that it does not matter whether the content they guide is true or false, but whether or not it is ‘happy’ (proper), because they themselves already represent a behaviour. ‘If reported properly, that is, by the right person, one notice, one condemnation or declaration is a news action’ (Bell, 1991: 206). Fishman (1980:  99) also points out that many official documents are of a performative nature, and journalists prefer such documents ‘because these are the most certain facts they can get’. If a person with the proper position says ‘I announce’ or ‘I denounce’, not only does what he is saying have news value, but that he says it in such a way is an indisputable fact in itself. This combination of discourse and behaviour is ideal for news reports because the reporter is not required to prove any other facts; the only fact is that a particular person has said something. From the wording of news headlines, it can often be predicted that there will be more so-​called ‘news performatives’ in the text. The following are a few news headlines and the news performatives that they include: ( 29) Sharon talks tough about hitting “enemies” (China Daily, 8 October  2003) (30) New law tough on drivers:  Motorists to be held responsible for all accidents under draft law before NPC (China Daily, 24 October 2003) (31) Premier Wen urges revival of Northeast (China Daily, 11 September  2003) (32) Seven Shenzhen soccer players strike? Pure nonsense! (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) (33) “We are the heirs of the 359 Brigade” (Guangming Daily, 29 September 2011) (34) The prosecutor in the trial of two defendants in Yuecheng international murder case shouted “No mercy!” (Modern Express, 2 November 2011)

20  Introduction to reported speech News titles like the above have a strong performative nature. However, if, in the main text, the choice of reporting verb is limited primarily to ‘say’, ‘tell’, ‘according to’ and other neutral words, the effect created will be rather unsatisfactory and bland. The majority of performative reporting verbs are sentimental in character; their choice and usage in the text will not only convey the source’s position and opinions, but also show the reporter’s views and attitudes towards the reported person and his discourse. Dixon (2005) classifies speaking verbs from the perspective of argument, of which reporting verbs is an important category. Speaking verbs can have four semantic role arguments: speaker, addressee, speech and medium. In general, speakers, addressees and medium are expressed by using noun phrases (NP) while messages can be expressed by NP and complement clauses. The syntactic relationship between the semantic roles of speech verbs is shown in Table 2.1 (Dixon, 2005: 147). Table 2.1 shows that five of the eight categories of speaking verbs can be used to guide direct speech, for example, ‘It’s Christmas Day, he shouted/​said/​ informed Mary/​told the children/​instructed the alien’. The other categories of speaking verbs are used to describe various vocal activities, and generally appear in the position of the appositive in direct speech. Dixon pays particular attention to the fourth category of reporting verbs in the table, and further divides them into the following eight subcategories (Dixon, 2005: 152): (i) say, declare, assert, one sense of observe, one sense of joke; put NP about, give NP out, let NP out, put NP across, let on about NP; (ii) state, affirm, rumour (mostly used in the passive); Table 2.1 The syntactic relationship between the semantic roles of speech verbs Speaker is always mapped onto subject (S or A) relation. Medium is generally introduced by in; the in can be omitted, with Medium then appearing to be in object (O) relation, for some verbs from subtypes (a). The possibilities for coding Message and Addressee are: Subtype

Message

Addressee

(a) TALK (b) DISCUSS (c) SHOUT (d) REPORT sets (i)-​(vii) set (viii) (e) INFORM (f) TELL

about/​concerning O O

with/​to/​at with/​to to/​at

O post-​O of/​on/​about about/​of O post-​O preposition

to O O O to/​of/​from O O

(g) ORDER (h) FORGIVE

{

Introduction to reported speech  21 (iii) announce, proclaim, mention, note, report; regret (also in LIKING); (iv) remark (on), comment (on); explain; (v) boast (about/​of), brag (about/​of), complain (about/​of), grumble (about); (vi) suggest, claim; acknowledge, admit, confess (to); (repute, which is confined to the passive, may also belong here); (vii) undertake, offer, propose; one sense of agree (with); (viii) promise, threaten. Palmer (1987:  197–​ 198) divides reporting verbs into five categories according to the different syntactic structures that are formed: 1. Many verbs have a NP, and then appear in the form of a to-​infinitive, for example: (35) The boy was alleged to have taken the car. Similar verbs include ACCEPT, AFFIRM, ANNOUNCE, ARGUE, ASSERT, CERTIFY, CONJECTURE, ESTIMATE, KNOW, PROVE, READ, RECKON, REPORT, REPRESENT, RUMOUR, SAY, STATE, SURMISE, TAKE, UNDERSTAND and almost all the verbs of perception. 2. Some verbs are not only used in conjunction with a NP and a to-​ infinitive, but also in the form of a NP + (-​en), often with the reflective -​self as a NP. For example: (36)  a.  They considered him to be a rogue. b.  They considered themselves beaten. c.  The chairman considered the meeting closed. In fact, it is difficult to clearly distinguish between this group of verbs and those in the other categories. However, one characteristic of these verbs is that they are semantically rather private, involving personal thoughts or beliefs etc., while the verbs in the other categories are more open in nature, that is, they publicly express thoughts and beliefs. Verbs in this category include BELIEVE, CONSIDER, DECLARE, DISCOVER, IMAGINE, SUPPOSE, etc. 3. Some verbs do not use a NP as an object, but instead use the -​ing form. For example: (37)  a.  I admit being a fool. b.  I admit John to be a fool. c.  John is admitted to be a fool. Similar verbs include ACKNOWLEDGE, CONFESS, DENY, etc. 4. Reporting verbs like CLAIM, with a similar usage to WANT, can be used in conjunction with a to-​infinitive or the -​ing form of a verb. For example: (38)  a.  He claims to be descended from Napoleon. b.  He claims his father to be Napoleon’s great grandson.

22  Introduction to reported speech PROFESS and AFFECT are also sometimes used with the -​ing form of a verb, for example: ( 39)  a.  He professes being a good scholar. b.  He professes to be a good scholar. 5. Reporting verbs like REMEMBER, RECOLLECT, RECALL, FORGET, etc. are all related to memory, and are often followed by the -​ing form of a verb, for example: (40)  a.  I remember coming to see you. b.  I remember having come to see you. c.  I remember my father going to London. d.  I remember my father to have been kind. Two of the above four sentences contain the verb HAVE, while two sentences do not. The presence or absence of HAVE determines different sentence meanings: when HAVE is absent, the sentence means that whatever event has occurred has been remembered; when HAVE is present, the sentence means that the fact that the event being remembered has already happened. From relatively early on, Geis (1987: 93) conducts studies of reporting verbs from the perspective of emotional tendencies. The choice of reporting verb is of particular importance to the communication effects produced by entire sentences. When reporting on a sentence spoken by the American politician Walter Mondale, two American publications, the U.S. News & World Report and TIME magazine, chose different reporting verbs, which produced very different effects: ( 41)  a.  Mondale muttered, “I can win this thing on my own.” b.  Mondale declared, “I can win this thing on my own.” (Geis, 1987: 93) In the above two examples, ‘mutter’ (‘whispering’, ‘grunt’, negative) presents the reader with a very timid image of Mondale, while the use of declare (‘announce’, ‘speak seriously’, neutral) makes his voice appear more imposing and confident. It can thus be seen that the choice of reporting verb plays an important role in the readers’ understanding of the reported content and formation of an image of the person being reported, which will ultimately affect their judgment and perception of the entire event. Reporting verbs are often divided into two categories depending on whether or not they are emotionally-​charged: neutral reporting verbs, which are unemotional in nature, and emotional reporting verbs. The latter can be further subdivided into ‘positive reporting verbs’ and ‘negative reporting verbs’. Neutral reporting verbs are a type of ‘the least marked’ verb, such as say, tell, ask, etc. They are used objectively and tend not to portray an obvious viewpoint; on the other hand, emotional reporting verbs have a more important meaning in political discourses, and are a powerful means by which reporters can express ‘bias’. Positive reporting verbs place the person being reported on ‘in the sun’, which produces a ‘positive affect’ and portrays a

Introduction to reported speech  23 cautious, calm, strong, rigorous or successful image; while negative reporting verbs place the person being reported on ‘in the shadows’, which produces a ‘negative affect’ and portrays a reckless, weak, imprecise, impulsive or loser-​ like image. The following tables list examples of these two types of reporting verbs: 40 positive reporting verbs (Table 2.2) and 40 negative reporting verbs (Table 2.3) taken from the corpus analysed by Geis. Table 2.2 The 40 most positive reporting verbs (from the strongest [detail] to the weakest [suggest]) detail advise reaffirm inform assure draw endorse caution assert intone reiterate explain maintain lean forward and smile review know cite propose note term

acknowledge predict stress a commitment to indicate deliver his theme stress his themes add describe agree praise drive home the notion stress continue offer refuse to give a hint recall tie this to that repeat invite suggest

Table 2.3 The 40 most negative reporting verbs (from the strongest [slash] to the weakest [extol]) slash plead crack blame taunt reverse himself swear mutter brag ridicule shoot back complain strike back trumpet his themes trumpet call tout attack blast quip

vilify gibe assail label pin the label on pound away pillory deride accuse declaim shrug denounce argue confess claim appeal disavow insist drone on extol

24  Introduction to reported speech Geis also finds that there is a high level of consensus among respondents on the emotional meanings expressed by some reporting verbs, while significant differences are found with other reporting verbs. In addition, it can be seen that the most common reporting verbs, such as say, tell, etc., do not appear in the above two lists of verbs, due to their neutral emotional expression. Bell (1991:  206) points out that ‘say’, ‘tell’ and ‘according to’ are typical neutral reporting verbs in English, and are the most neutral or semantically unmarked. Cole and Shaw’s (1974) study finds that reported speech using ‘said’ without a description of body language is considered to be the most credible, the most precise, the most objective, the calmest and the clearest, but is also the most monotonous and boring. If other reporting verbs are used instead of ‘said’ throughout the reported text and a description of body language is included, this type of reported speech is considered to be the least credible, the least precise, the least objective and the least clear, but is also the most vivid and lively. The evaluations provided by the respondents on reported texts that either do not use ‘said’ (but use other reporting verbs instead) or do not include a description of body language lie in between these two extremes. In addition, when using the first method to report the words of others (using ‘said’ and not including a description of body language), the person being reported is more likely to be considered cautious and restrained by the addressee; on the other hand, when using the second method to provide a report (not using ‘said’ and including a description of body language), the person being reported is more likely to be considered reckless and impulsive. Therefore, the reporter must obtain a good balance when reporting the words of others and, depending on the content and purpose of the report, find a balance between objective credibility and liveliness in order to obtain good communicative effects. The collocation of neutral reporting verbs, such as say and tell, and different forms of reported speech, can also produce different meanings. For example, if the reporting verb is followed by indirect speech, it signifies the analysis and foregrounding of the referential meaning or the content of the statement, indicating that the reported content is referential or predicational; on the other hand, if the reporting verb is followed by direct speech, the form of the reported speech is emphasised rather than the content. Therefore, using ‘say’ along with direct speech is the most neutral form of reporting, and gives the least specific evaluation of the communicative function of the reported speech. Geis also proposes the concept of the ‘volatility’ of reporting verbs, which can be divided into two types, depending on the degree of change in their volatility characteristics: ‘low volatility’ reporting verbs (Table 2.4) and ‘high volatility’ reporting verbs (Table  2.5). ‘Low volatility’ verbs are often conventional, standard reporting verbs, such as report, reply, answer, comment, say, etc., and are usually maintained in a relatively neutral and positive state. ‘High volatility’ verbs are highly dynamic in nature and tend to deviate from neutrality, thereby producing negative effects.

Introduction to reported speech  25 Table 2.4 Low volatility reporting verbs LOW VOLATILITY report reply answer comment say continue describe give the response inform gibe believe respond offer note agree endorse praise

deliver his theme detail cite acknowledge tell advise recall term remember speak the words assure promise predict recognise raise the issue know call for

Table 2.5 High volatility reporting verbs HIGH VOLATILITY blast refuse to give a hint declaim appeal mutter shoot back call accent with the line concede vilify quip confess intone reverse himself trumpet his themes pillory disavow pin the label on attack plead

trumpet caution strike back slash brag stress his theme claim argue label denounce press ridicule draw lean forward and smile contend smile and say assail react strongly reaffirm stress a commitment to

26  Introduction to reported speech Thompson (1996, 2000) considers the reporting verb to be a type of ‘reporting signal’. In addition to reporting verbs, the reporting signal also includes main reporting clause, reporting adjunct, reporting noun and reporting adjective. Consider the following examples (see Thompson, 1996: 508–​520): (42) British Coal said it could only damage the industry. (43) As Voisin points out, without earthworms there would be no civilization. (44) Yet now there is a suggestion that these purchasers will have to find a 25% down payment. (45) Bank of England officials were dismissive of suggestions that measures were needed against speculators. Thompson (1996) insists on studying reporting from the perspective of function rather than structure, and constructs an overall framework for studying ‘language reports’, which includes the following four dimensions, namely ‘voice’, ‘message’, ‘signal’ and ‘attitude’. The ‘attitude’ dimension refers to the current reporter’s or original speaker’s ‘evaluation’ of the reported content, and the reporting verb is the main means by which this evaluation is reflected. Thus, depending on the different attitudes that are to be reflected in the reported speech, reporting verbs can be divided into three categories, namely neutral, positive and negative. This classification is more or less the same as Geis’s classification. For example: (46) Anthony told him the proposal was out of the question. (neutral) (47) Robert Birmingham also points out that forward planning can help avoid stressful pitfalls. (positive) (48) He died in prison. From pneumonia. Or so they say. (negative) Yamashita (1998) compares the reporting verbs used in British and Japanese newspapers, and divides them into the following four categories, as seen here in Table 2.6. Yamashita’s comparative analysis shows that reporting verbs are generally used less in Japanese than in English. The rate of occurrence of the verb ‘say’ Table 2.6 Reporting verb categories distinguished by Yamashita reporting verbs

say, tell, speak, ask, report, broadcast, answer, reply

mental (thought) verbs

wonder, recall, think, reflect, regret, believe, remember

manner of speaking verbs shout speech act (illocutionary) verbs

warn, claim, mention, explain, admit, deny, suggest, reject, point out, refer, repeat, maintain, appeal, add, demand, request, clarify, declare, testify, object, judge, press, joke, persuade, induce, complain, give up, reveal, order, stress, speculate, allege, confirm, contend

Introduction to reported speech  27 in English newspapers is particularly high, reaching 83 per cent. Mental verbs rarely appear in either Japanese or English newspapers. Floyd A (2000) believes that reporting verbs have a degree of ‘bias’. He analyses the quotations in The New York Times concerning the conflict between Iraq and the US in the Persian Gulf. He finds that ‘our side’, that is, the party supporting the US’s military interference in the affairs of other countries, and ‘their side’ (that is, the opposing party) use different reporting verbs. Some words (such as reiterate and repeat) appear to be neutral on the surface, but are more often used by ‘our side’. The reporting verbs ‘say’ and ‘tell’ in English are generally regarded to be neutral words, but if they are collocated with some adverbs (such as solemnly), they appear to be less objective. In addition, verbs such as announce, promise, appeal, disclose, divulge, reveal, confirm, explain, make clear, inform, point out, spell out, state, tell of and tell how are often used to report the words of ‘our side’, while reporting verbs such as allege, claim and taunt are only used to report the words of ‘their side’. Some scholars focus primarily on the use of reporting verbs in academic discourses. Thompson and Ye’s (1991) study involves a dataset of approximately 100 academic journal papers taken from the fields of applied linguistics, geology, public management, engineering, veterinary medicine, etc. The reporting verbs used in the introduction of each journal paper are extracted and divided into two categories. Firstly, two types of reporting verbs are distinguished from the perspective of ‘denotation’:  verbs used to report ‘author acts’ and verbs used to report ‘writer acts’. The former can be further divided into ‘textual’, ‘mental’ and ‘research’, while the latter can be divided into ‘comparing’ and ‘theorising’, as shown in Figure 2.1. Examples of the verbs in the above categories are shown in Table 2.7. Secondly, reporting verbs can also be divided into three different categories: those representing the ‘author’s stance’, the ‘writer’s stance’ and the ‘writer’s interpretation’ from the perspective of their ‘evaluative potential’, as shown in Table 2.8. Inspired by Thompson and Ye (1991), Thomas and Hawes (1994) select ten journal articles on psychosomatic medicine from eight different psychosomatic research journals. They believe that there are universal patterns and laws for the selection of reporting verbs. They divide reporting verbs into three categories: ‘real-​world or experiment activity verbs’, ‘discourse activity verbs’ and ‘cognition activity verbs’, as shown in Table 2.9.

Reporng Writer acts

Author act

Textual

Mental

Research

Comparing

Figure 2.1 Comparing and theorising

Theorizing

28  Introduction to reported speech Table 2.7 Reporting verbs distinguished by reference author acts

writer acts

textual

state, write, term, challenge, underline, point out, name, deny

mental

believe, think, focus on, consider, prefer

research

measure, calculate, quantify, obtain, find

comparing

correspond to, accord with, anticipate, contrast with

theorising

account for, explain, support

Table 2.8 Reporting verbs distinguished by their evaluative potential author’s stance

writer’s stance

writer’s interpretation

positive

accept, emphasise, hypothesise, invoke, note, point out, posit, reason, subscribe to

negative

attack, challenge, dismiss, dispute, diverge from, object to, oppose, question, reject

neutral

assess, examine, evaluate, focus on, pose, quote, tackle, undertake

factive

acknowledge, bring out, demonstrate, identify, improve, notice, prove, recognise, substantiate, throw light on

counter-​factive

betray (ignorance), confuse, disregard, ignore, misuse

non-​factive

advance, believe, claim, examine, generalise, propose, retain, urge, utilise

author’s discourse interpretation

add, comment, continue, detail, mention, note, recast, repeat, remark, sketch

author’s behaviour interpretation

status interpretation

account for, bring out, confirm, conform to, overcome, establish, popularise, prove, solve

non-​ interpretation

adopt, apply, calculate, employ, map, observe, provide, recount, say, see, use, write

Introduction to reported speech  29 Table 2.9 Reporting verbs distinguished by Thomas and Hawes (1994) reporting verbs (134)

real-​world procedural verbs (51, 21%) verbs (70, 52%)

categorized, assessed, conducted, correlated, completed, assigned, examined, studied, evaluated, analyzed, used, administrated, compared

finding verbs objective verbs found, observed, (55, 79%) (42, 76%) associated, obtained effect verbs (13, 24%)

demonstrated, showed, established

discourse qualification verbs (3, 5%) cautioned, raised the activity question, called verbs attention to the fact (52, 39%) tentativity pre-​experiment hypothesized, postulated, verbs (18, verbs (8, proposed 35%) 44%)

certainty verbs (31, 60%)

cognition activity verbs (12, 9%)

post-​ experiment verbs (10, 56%)

suggests, indicates

argument verbs (10, 32%)

present support, cite evidence, maintain, provide evidence, concluded, invoked

informing verbs (21, 68%)

stated, documented, reported, referred to, noted, called attention to believed, considered, regarded, thought, viewed, assumed, recognized

Thomas and Hawes’s above classification is very similar to Thompson’s classification, with ‘real-​world verbs’ corresponding to ‘research verbs’, ‘discourse activity verbs’ corresponding to ‘textual verbs’ and ‘cognition activity verbs’ corresponding to ‘mental verbs’. However, due to the different research aims of the two studies, the classifications perform different evaluative functions.

2.4  News sources ‘News source’ is the term generally used to refer to the source of the reported speech and its sender, but it may be more accurate to call this the ‘source

30  Introduction to reported speech of the reported speech’, as there is a difference between the two terms. The former should refer to the information channels that reporters rely on when writing news reports. For example, Van Dijk (1988a) identifies 12 types of news sources when analysing news reports in Dutch newspapers: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Dispatches of national and international news agencies. Press releases of institutions, organisations, firms, etc. Press conferences, including invitations to them. Agendas and materials of a large number of legislative bodies, committees, and organisations. 5. Reports from various organisations. 6. Interviews with representatives of organisations. 7. Phone calls with representatives of organisations. 8. Notes of interviews, phone calls, press conferences, etc. 9. Official letters of organisations (often to other organisations), sometimes accompanied by documentation. 10. Articles in a variety of foreign and domestic newspapers. 11. Documentation, including documentation from one’s own newspaper (clippings). 12. Printed versions of speeches, interventions in meetings, and debates. Whitaker (1981) details the following organisations and occasions that British journalists rely on as news sources. 1. 2. 3.

Sources monitored routinely a. Parliament b. Councils c. Police (and the Army in Northern Ireland) d. Other emergency services e. Courts (including inquests and tribunals) f. Royalty g. ‘Diary’ events (e.g. annual events like Ascot or conferences known about in advance) h. Airports i. Other news media Organisations issuing statements and holding press conferences a. Government departments b. Local authority departments c. Public services (transport authorities, electricity boards, etc.) d. Companies e. Trade unions f. Non-​commercial organisations (pressure groups, charities, etc.) g. Political parties h. Army, Navy and Air Force Individuals making statements, seeking publicity, etc. a. Prominent people (e.g. bishops and film stars) b. Members of the public.

Introduction to reported speech  31 Bell (1991) lists eight news sources upon which he relied when writing a news report: 1. Notes from a brief preliminary face-​to-​face interview with the leader of the group of scientists who had been researching the introduction of the mite. 2. Notes from a later telephone interview with the same group leader. 3. The 350-​page Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) on the effects of introducing the gorse mite. 4. Draft press release written by the principal scientist involved. 5. Cover letter from this scientist accompanying the press release. 6. Copy of a press release (and published clips). 7. Notes from a telephone interview with the scientist (and follow-​ up questions in subsequent phone calls). 8. Amendments to the draft story made by both scientist and group leader. Compared with the news sources given by Van Dijk and Whitaker, the news sources listed by Bell are more specific and are therefore more likely to be the sources of the reported speech. Sources of the reported speech refer to the origins that reporters give credit to when quoting the words, opinions or suggestions of others, and can be either an individual or a social organisation, but not the time or occasion (such as conferences, journalist interviews, press conferences, etc.). However, because ‘news sources’ and ‘sources of the reported speech’ often overlap, in order to keep the convention to avoid confusion we will not distinguish between the two terms in this study. Bell (1991: 191) points out: ‘the news is mainly about what someone said as an eyewitness to the facts or an agent of the news. But someone does not mean anyone’. In other words, it is not a casual choice as to whose quotation appears in the news report. Allowing the audience to hear a particular source’s voice indicates that the reporter is assigning more importance to this voice than to other voices. In fact, the choice of a news source in a news report largely ‘reflects cultural beliefs and power structures’ (Caldas-​Coulthard, 1995: 229). When researching the news outlets CBS, NBC, Newsweek and Time magazine, Gans (1979) finds that the news is actually dominated by celebrities, including current presidents, presidential candidates, major federal government officials, state/​local officials and offenders, while non-​celebrities only account for 20 per cent of the reports. These reports include the following five categories: (1) protesters, rioters and strikers; (2) victims; (3) offenders; (4) voters, respondents and other offenders; (5) participants of unusual events. Sigal’s (1973) research demonstrates the dominance of official news sources. By investigating The Washington Post and The New York Times, Sigal finds that the American government and the governments of foreign countries account for 75 per cent of all news sources, and almost 60 per cent of news reports are obtained from conventional channels, such as official procedures, press conferences and press releases. This finding was later confirmed by Brown et al. (1987). Sigal (1973) divides news sources into three categories:  (1) conventional channels, including official procedures (such as trials, judicial hearings, etc.),

32  Introduction to reported speech press conferences, press releases and non-​spontaneous events (such as research, celebrations, etc.); (2)  informal channels, including leaks, non-​government procedures, reports from other news media, interviews with other journalists and editors, etc.; (3) active channels, including interviews actively conducted by journalists, such as on-​site reports, independent investigations and the personal summaries and analyses of journalists. News sources can also be divided into two main categories: (1) active news sources, that is, people who actively provide information to news units and journalists; (2) passive news sources, that is, people who unconsciously provide news organisations with material on events of widespread concern during interviews. In this study, the term ‘news source’ refers primarily to the source of the reported utterance. More specifically, we can divide news sources into six categories, depending on the voice behind the news source: party and government agencies, journalists and the media, experts and scholars, social groups, companies and enterprises, general public, as detailed below. A. Party and government agencies:  This category includes all levels of the organisations and departments of national political parties and ruling governments as well as leaders, staff and spokesmen who have been granted certain administrative powers. For example: (49) According to the Ministry of Education, it is stipulated that the standard class size for primary schools is 45 to 50 and for secondary schools is 50 to 55. Only this number can guarantee the quality of education. But in reality, there are many “big classes” that all parties do not want to see. (Guangming Daily, 29 September 2004) (50) In the autumn season, The Fourth Plenary Session of the 16th CPC Central Committee adopts the Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Strengthening the Construction of the Party’s Ruling Capability. The Decision profoundly elaborates on the importance and urgency of strengthening the governance capability of the Party, and systematically summarises our party’s 55 years of ruling experience, clarifies the guiding ideology, overall goals and main tasks of strengthening governance capability, and proposes many new ideas, new thoughts and new measures. It is our party’s programmatic document to strengthen its governance capability. (Guangming Daily, 10 October 2004) (51) Today, Director General of the College Students Department of Ministry of Education, Lin Huiqing, said at a news conference held jointly by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Personnel, the Ministry of Labour Security and the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China, that, so far, the graduate student employment rate has reached 93% and the employment rate of undergraduates is 84%, slightly higher than that of last year. The employment rate of vocational school graduates has increased by 6 percentage points compared with the same period last year, reaching 61%. (Guangming Daily, 29 September 2004)

Introduction to reported speech  33 B. Journalists and the media: The term ‘journalist’ refers to the news journalist himself as the news source, and appears in the discourse as ‘the journalist discovers’, ‘the journalist recognises’, etc., or appears in the form of questions and answers in an interview. The term ‘media’ refers to the transfer of messages or words from other news media. For example: (52) A journalist discovers during investigation that since schools started in autumn, the phenomenon of a “big class” has been increasing in some urban primary and secondary schools. Students, parents and teachers all have many opinions on this, and schools also have many complaints. (Guangming Daily, 29 September 2004) (53) The Egyptian media points out that the demonstrators are mainly secular figures who are sympathizers of the former regime. After the fall of the Mubarak regime, the power of the sympathizers of the former regime has become very weak. Large-​scale demonstrations are mainly initiated by Muslim Brotherhood and “revolutionary” youth forces. On the 15th, the demonstrations basically subsided… The Egyptian Al-​Ahram newspaper points out that Clinton’s visit to Egypt shows that realism defeats idealism in American diplomacy. After Muslim Brotherhood came to power, the US Senate and House, the State Council and the Department of Defense have been vigorously debating whether to deal with Muslim Brotherhood. The US Senate and House are particularly concerned. They believe that they should avoid any close contact with Muslim Brotherhood, and, in particular, avoid guaranteeing the Brotherhood any financial assistance before it clearly states its internal and external policies. The article in The New York Times says that the United States is not only suspicious of Muslim Brotherhood, but is also dissatisfied with the various actions of the Egyptian military. It is worried that the military’s obstruction of democratic transition will make the situation in Egypt even more unstable… (People’s Daily, 16 July 2011) C. Experts and scholars: This group includes people who have made outstanding achievements or contributions in a certain field and are widely recognised by industry and/​or society. For example: (54) Some experts have analyzed that the number of private car licenses auctioned in Shanghai is actually a street passing right. As an international metropolis, Shanghai is faced with a large population influx and the rapid development of motor vehicles, with fewer road resources, more traffic jams and more air pollution. Under these circumstances, since 1994, Shanghai has introduced an auction policy for citizens new motor vehicle quotas.

“Auctions, number-​shifting and other purchase restriction policies are in fact ‘first aid’ measures. To solve the problem of the excessively rapid increase in license plate prices and traffic congestion, it is essential to

34  Introduction to reported speech ‘adjust’ the city, improve road resource utilization and energetically develop a high-​quality public transport service,” says Professor Yang Xiaoguang, Director of the Department of Transportation Engineering in the school of Traffic Engineering and Transportation, and doctoral supervisor at Tongji University… (People’s Daily, 16 July 2011) D. Social groups: This refers to non-​ profit social welfare groups or organisations, such as schools, hospitals, research institutions, literary and artistic groups, environmental protection organisations, etc. or other representatives. For example: (55) A statement issued on July 1st by Fudan University states: During this year’s higher education recruitment period, Fudan University, together with some excellent candidates from various provinces and cities and their parents, after interviews, negotiations and consultations, finally achieved the pre-​ admission agreement and strictly adhered to it. However, “someone dared to pretend to be a professor at Fudan and made phone calls to the candidates, claiming that their agreement with Fudan was cancelled”. The Head of the Fudan Admissions Department says that he has recently received calls from candidates in Guangdong, Yunnan, Hubei and other provinces, asking if Fudan has cancelled the pre-​admission agreement that was previously signed… (People’s Daily, 14 July 2011) (56) Liu Tao, Vice President of the China Electronics Enterprise Association, demonstrates that, there are five million units of “five major pieces” discarded each year in Zhejiang Province. If the “trade-​in” policy is cancelled at the end of this year, it is likely that the company will not get one million units of goods. (People’s Daily, 4 July 2011) E. Companies and enterprises: This category includes profitable financial organisations and their representatives. These organisations are legally established; engage in economic activities such as production, circulation and services; meet social needs with products or services and implement independent management and accounting. For example: (57) “Formal enterprises need to install expensive environmental protection facilities and issue formal invoices. They do not have an advantage with their recycling prices, so naturally they will be unable to obtain goods,” says Gu Jiandong, deputy general manager of the Hangzhou Dadi Environmental Protection Co. Ltd, a pilot enterprise dealing with the recycling and disposing of waste electronic products in China. After the implementation of the “trade-​in” policy for home appliances in 2009, consumers are willing to hand over household electrical appliance wastes to manufacturing enterprises or shopping malls because the government

Introduction to reported speech  35 provides a subsidy for them. In this way, formal dismantling enterprises can obtain household electrical appliance waste through formal channels… Tao Caojin, chairman of the Zhejiang Huanyi Resources Utilization Co. Ltd introduces that, the original tax benefit policies for resource recycling enterprises have also been cancelled, and the current value-​added tax rate has been restored to 17%, which puts great pressure on the operation of these enterprises. “Last year, our output value was only 1.7 billion yuan, while tax payments were more than 100 million yuan. The financial burden was very heavy…” (People’s Daily, 4 July 2011) F. General public: This refers to ordinary people, including students, farmers and general labourers. (58) A teacher tells reporters that due to the large number of students, teachers have to focus on better teaching the big class, thus it is impossible to provide individual tutoring to students. Teachers dare not even ask students questions, fearing that children will not have the opportunity to speak after raising their hands, which will affect their motivation. Now if asked about each student’s personality and characteristics in her class, she doesn’t have the confidence to answer. (Guangming Daily, 29 September 2004) (59) Over the past few days, the craze for studying the spirit of General Secretary’s speech on July 1st has spread across the country. Cadres and the masses state that they must implement the spirit of General Secretary Hu Jintao’s important speech with practical actions, innovate new achievements and take great leaps forward from this new starting point and comprehensively advance the great cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics. “General Secretary proposes that the entire party should pay attention to the youth, care for the youth and love the youth. The party has high expectations for us, the youth,” says Inner Mongolian Youth Student Bai Yu. “We young people must keep in mind the trust bestowed on us by the party, seize this rare opportunity for development, work hard and dedicate ourselves to the cause of the party and country…” (People’s Daily, 5 July 2011) In short, when reporters quote the words or opinions of others, they generally have to provide the origin of the quotation, i.e. the source of the news. There are various ways to classify the news source, but there are three main types (Jian Zhang, 1994:  85–​89; Bin Xin, 1998):  (A) specific and accurate sources:  the reporter clarifies the name of the originator of the quotation; (B) implicit sources: the reporter does not directly indicate the originator of the quotation, but uses non-​specific words to imply the originator, such as ‘local sources said…’ and ‘officials from the Supreme People’s Court said…’; (C) no mention of the source: the reporter is either unclear about the identity of the source or feels that the source is unimportant or should be deliberately

36  Introduction to reported speech concealed, so he uses the passive voice, for example ‘It is said/​reported/​ learned…’ or some vague expressions, such as ‘Reports say…’ and ‘There were reports…’, to explain the source of the quotation.

2.5  Reported speech and Bakhtin’s dialogue theory Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–​ 1975) was a Russian philosopher of worldwide renown and one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. His wide-​ranging ideas significantly influenced the fields of philosophy, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, historical culture and literature. He had many interests and wrote numerous books. Reported speech played an extremely important role in Bakhtin’s thinking on language and philosophy, with his thoughts on language being based on communication and dialogue. Bakhtin believed that human self-​construction must refer to others, and language is always involved in the communication and dialogue between people. No language can be isolated or separated from discourse. The main aim of Bakhtin’s dialogue theory is the study of the dialogic relationship of reported speech. Bakhtin defines reported speech as ‘speech within speech, utterance within utterance’ and ‘speech about speech, utterance about utterance’ (Volosinov, 1973:  115).2 In general, he uses the term ‘reported speech’, but sometimes the phrase ‘reported discourse’ is also used. The reason he uses the two pragmatic concepts of ‘speech’ and ‘discourse’ is related to his post-​structuralist view of language. Bakhtin is also concerned with the understanding of reported speech. He believes that understanding is not to negatively obtain the meaning of language, but to positively respond to it. Understanding is realised in a dialogue between a speaker and a listener, and is a reflection of the dialogic nature of speech. Bakhtin believes that true understanding should not be interpreted as something personal or purely psychological, but as a representation of social relations: ‘Language reflects, not subjective, psychological vacillations, but stable social interrelationships among speakers’ (Volosinov, 1973: 118). The internal mechanism behind the entire process of reporting is not personal, but is instead socially-​based, and social functions determine the reporting mode. Bakhtin is critical of past research on reported speech because it did not consider the reporting context, but focused only on the investigation of various reporting modes, often from a static and unchanging perspective. However, it is the dynamic relationship between reported speech and the reporting context that needs examining. This relationship reveals and reflects the dynamic social interactions that take place between people. Bakhtin believes that there are two different directions that have to be taken to grasp this dynamic relationship. Firstly, reporting in general should maintain the authenticity and integrity of the original words as much as possible. The boundary between ‘my language’ and ‘the language of others’ should be clear. This first tendency is what Bakhtin calls a ‘linear style’, and ‘a basic tendency of the style is to establish a clear external outline of speech when the internal

Introduction to reported speech  37 personalization of others’ speech is weakened’ (Bakhtin, 1998: 465). At this stage, the author’s speech and the reported speech are clearly demarcated. A form of direct speech is used, which is closely related to medieval theology, rationalism and mechanism. Dogmatism was dominant in seventeenth century France and eighteenth century Russia, and quoted speech was linked to power, so therefore direct speech was widely used during these eras. Secondly, another direction that the reporting process can develop in is the pictorial style. When compared to the linear style, the pictorial style presents different characteristics. ‘Language continues to produce some more incisive and thorough methods for expressing various emotions, so that the author inserts interrupters and comments into the others’ speech’ (Bakhtin, 1998: 473). The other person’s speech is dispelled by the author’s context, so that the boundary between one’s own speech and the other person’s speech becomes blurred, and it is therefore already unclear who says what. Bakhtin points out that this style is related to the Renaissance period of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. ‘The rational dogmatism of word authority has been completely eliminated, while the relativity of some social evaluation gets the predominance, which makes for getting minor differences in thoughts, beliefs, emotions and all other languages of personality’ (Bakhtin, 1998:  473). Indirect speech is the main form of pictorial style. With the author’s speech and the other person’s speech interpenetrating, merging and dialoguing, this style tends to be more open and diverse in nature. After clarifying the dynamic relationship between one’s own speech and the speech of others, Bakhtin also analyses in detail the types and variants of reported speech. In accordance with the syntactic model, Bakhtin focuses on three types of reported speech in Russian: ‘indirect discourse’, ‘direct discourse’ and ‘quasi-​direct discourse’. Indirect discourse and its characteristics: This is the least studied type of reported speech in Russian. Bakhtin was the first person to criticise the grammarian AM Peškovskij’s view that Russian is unsuitable for indirect reporting. Examples given by Peškovskij are as follows: (60) The Ass, bowing his head to the ground, says to the Nightingale that not bad, that no kidding. It’s nice listening to him sing, but that what a shame he doesn’t know their Rooster, that he could sharpen up his singing quite a bit, if he’d take some lessons from him. Bakhtin points out that the way in which Peškovskij converts from direct speech to indirect speech is mechanical in nature, only taking grammatical correctness into consideration, while ignoring style, creativity and other factors in the reporting process. Peškovskij’s example does not demonstrate that Russian is unsuitable for indirect reporting. He does not fully understand the nature of indirect speech or that analyticity is the main feature of indirect speech. Converting from direct speech to indirect speech is not a simple, literal grammatical conversion, but requires subjective analysis, not only of

38  Introduction to reported speech the content but also of the form. The conversion between different forms of reporting is not full reporting, but selective and analytical partial reporting, where choices are made depending on the author’s intentions. Consider, for example, the sentence ‘Well done! What an achievement!’. We are unable to report it mechanically as ‘He said that well done and what an achievement’, because ‘well done’ is a phrase and ‘that’ introduces a clause. Therefore, the sentence can be reported as ‘He said, delightedly, that that had been done well and was a real achievement’ (Volosinov, 1973: 129). Bakhtin explores three modifications of indirect discourse from different analytical emphases: ‘referent-​analysing modification’, ‘text-​analysing modification’ and ‘impressionistic modification’. Referent-​analysing modification focuses primarily on the analysis of the content and the theme, while text-​ analysing modification places an emphasis on the style and text. For example, some strongly emotional words cannot be used in indirect speech but need to be adjusted to match the author’s attitude, be it praise, irony or humour. Impressionistic modification lies somewhere between referent-​ analysing modification and text-​analysing modification, and is generally used to report and highlight what the protagonist is saying to himself as well as his thoughts and experiences. Direct discourse and its characteristics: This is a common type of reported speech in Russian, with four variants: preset direct discourse, particularised direct discourse, rhetorical direct discourse and substituted direct discourse. In the case of preset direct discourse, the speech is first adjusted by the author and therefore is greatly influenced by his/​her subjectivity. Particularised direct discourse signifies that the author’s previous modelling and description of the protagonist’s image, personality, etc. can be deeply branded into the language used, so that for some direct discourses, even if their origins are unclear, the reader is still able to distinguish the protagonist’s own words. Rhetorical direct discourse is a particularly interesting type, and is often located between the author’s speech and the reported speech. The following example can be regarded as either the protagonist’s self-​talk or a question raised by the author. (61) But who is approaching, stealthy footed, by moonlit path, amid deepest stillness? The Russian suddenly comes to. Before him stands, with tender, wordless greeting, the Circassian maid. He gazes at her silently and thinks: this is some lying dream, the hollow play of flagging feelings… (Volosinov, 1973: 138) Substituted direct discourse is a unique form of reported speech, where the voices of both the author and protagonist merge and develop in the same direction, forming a parallel relationship. In other words, these voices together achieve a harmonious unity between ‘my words’ and ‘the words of others’. Quasi-​direct discourse and its characteristics: Bakhtin’s research focuses on quasi-​direct speech. He first combs through the work of previous scholars in this area and, on this basis, he expounds a number of views.

Introduction to reported speech  39 Firstly, what is quasi-​direct discourse? Tobler defines it as ‘a mixture of direct and indirect speech’, Kalepky calls it ‘disguised discourse’, Lerch sees it as ‘factual language’ and Lorck regards it as the ‘speech of experience’. Lerch’s definition is in terms of the authenticity of the content, while Lorck emphasises the importance of quasi-​direct discourse as a stylistic approach. Bakhtin draws lessons from some of their concepts, and then highlights that quasi-​direct discourse is not a simple combination of direct and indirect discourse. ‘Other’s speech and the context constructed by the author together form similarities between monologues in the dialogue. The author approaches the protagonist in this way, and their relationship is formed in the dialogue’ (Bakhtin, 1998: 523). Secondly, compared with the other two types of reported discourse, quasi-​ reported discourse is of great significance to literary creations, and in this regard Bakhtin agrees with Lorck’s viewpoint. For artists, the main purpose of using quasi-​reported discourse is not to exchange information or express ideas, but to resonate with the protagonist’s feelings and emotions. ‘The creative role in language belongs not to the intellect but to fantasy’ (Volosinov, 1973: 148). Therefore, imagination is the essence of the quasi-​reporting speech. Thirdly, Bakhtin is opposed to both ‘abstract objectivism’ and ‘individualistic subjectivism’. The former focuses on only the abstract form of language, separating language form from reality and regarding language in isolation; the latter places too much emphasis on ‘personality’ and ‘individual motivation’. Abstract objectivism regards language to be a stable, closed system, which cuts off the dialectical relationship between the current system of language and history. Bakhtin emphasises the historical nature of language, but individual subjectivism ignores objective factors in ideology when studying quasi-​direct discourse. It lacks sociality and is based on personal psychology, and is only ‘talking about consciousness for the sake of consciousness’. By criticising the above two schools of thought, Bakhtin emphasises the social, historical and ideological nature of language, and thus establishes his philosophy of language. The concept of ‘dialogue’ in Bakhtin’s dialogue theory actually has two layers of meaning. The first meaning refers to the product of verbal communication, and describes its structure, semantics and syntactic features. It is a research area for traditional linguistics and a closed static study. The second meaning is to regard ‘dialogue’ as a means of verbal communication, focusing on the process of discourse production and the relationships between various complex factors in this process, particularly the subject of speech, between the speaker and the listener. The relationship is both entangled and mutually exclusive, forming a large network of infinite stretches. It is an open and dynamic research. In essence, ‘dialogue’ is a dialogue of consciousness between communicative subjects which stems from the communicative nature of social life. Reported speech is not only a product of language, but also a means of communication in the specific discourses between different speech subjects. Therefore, reported speech has the dual significance of thought and method in Bakhtin’s dialogue theory. On the one

40  Introduction to reported speech hand, his dialogue theory places particular emphasis on the dialogic ability of speech. He believes that all speeches are conversational, and every expression is filled with the voices of other people. He expounds the relationship between reported speech and context from the perspective of verbal communication, and reveals the dialogic nature of all human discourse by analysing the dialogue relationship between people in reported speech. On the other hand, Bakhtin introduces Russian functional linguistic thought into linguistics, and explores the correct method for undertaking language research by analysing reported speech in literary works. First, Bakhtin believes that language researchers should study discourse under real conditions. As mentioned above, Bakhtin criticises Saussure for treating language as the only legitimate research object of linguistics. He advocates that language research should go beyond the structure of language itself to study specific real-​life speech or discourse, which is the research objective of translinguistics. Secondly, Bakhtin advocates revealing the fundamental dialogic nature of discourse from the perspectives of structure, form and semantics, thus unifying internal and external factors and integrating form and content. In his analysis of literary works, Bakhtin emphasises both form and content. He does not oppose them, nor does he affirm or criticise them. Instead, he finds a connection between them, recognising both form and content equally, and strives to find a balance between them. Bakhtin’s research method, focusing on both form and content, emphasises not only conducting a scientific analysis of the language, structure and genre of literary works from the perspective of form, but also disclosing the cultural and ideological connotations contained in the work from the perspective of content. Again, Bakhtin emphasises that the analysis of reported speech must be interpreted from broader social and cultural perspectives, such as sociality, ideology and history, with the social context taken into consideration. Reported speech is related to societies, not individuals. Abstract personalities do not exist. ‘There is no person who is independent of society and therefore independent of objective economic conditions’. ‘The personality of a person is only part of a whole society from a historical perspective. From a cultural point of view, it becomes productive’ (Todorov, 2001: 215). Only by positioning in society can a person become a real person and choose his own personal and textual content. Therefore, Bakhtin argues that language phenomena should not be explained from the perspective of personal psychology, but we should understand the sociological nature behind all these phenomena. We should not settle for recognising and converting the surface form of reported speech, but we should dig deeper into the change of form and determine any underlying social and cultural factors so that we can more objectively explore the meaning of language in different reported modes and the contextual factors that are relevant to reported speech. Finally, it should be noted that reported speech is the essence of Bakhtin’s dialogue theory. By analysing dialogue, the importance of human existence

Introduction to reported speech  41 and human factors in the study of the humanities can be demonstrated. In the humanities, humans and texts are objects of each other. Unlike the purely objective natural sciences, the humanities are without exception closely related to human, the subject, so all texts produced by humans or humanised texts bear the mark of human, the subject. Man is considered to be the ultimate subject. The text, as a fact, becomes the object of our research and, as a producer, we also have to study the characteristics of human deposited in the text. The typical mistake made by Saussure and other structuralists is to regard language as an object from the perspective of natural science by stripping away the subjective aspect of language, thus preventing the essence of language from being fully revealed. Of course, Bakhtin’s research on reported speech also has shortcomings. For example, it is limited to literary works and, in particular, the analysis of novels written by Dostoevsky and Rabelais. The application of Bakhtin’s thoughts on reported speech to the analysis of non-​literary texts, such as the form and function of news discourse, is a bigger issue and requires further exploration in both theory and practice. Bakhtin investigated only Russian, French and German texts, and did not discuss other languages, such as English, Chinese, Japanese, etc., and thus there is vast room for further research. Besides, Bakhtin displays a strong consciousness of political and class struggles when discussing reported speech, highlighting the ideological tone of the language used, which was determined by the political and economic environment he was in. Russian academics in the fields of philosophy, language and literature were greatly influenced by a range of political-​ideological factors at that moment in time. In short, Bakhtin’s contribution to reported speech research is to break out of the ‘linguistic cage’ of structuralism and to leave behind the traditional methods of analysis by advancing a unique research paradigm. In fact, Bakhtin explores the dialogic nature of all human discourse through the discussion of reported speech. Any discourse is in fact a two-​sided act, which depends not only on who said what, but also to whom. As a word, it is precisely the product of the mutual relationship between the speaker and the listener, the speaker, and the receiver. Every word expresses the relationship between 'one’ and ‘other’. I express myself from the perspective of others. One word builds a bridge between me and others. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other end depends on my recipient. One word is the territory shared by the speaker and the recipient, the speaker and his dialogue partner. (Volosinov, 1973: 86)

2.6  Reported speech and news discourse In real life, we hear words about the speaker and his words all the time. We can even say that what most people talk about in real life is what

42  Introduction to reported speech others say –​they communicate, recall, weigh, and evaluate other people’s words, opinions, assertions, and messages. People refer to other people’s words and express concern, approval, or opposition to others’ words. (Bakhtin, 1981: 338) The importance of speech reporting in news discourse is unquestionable. News reporting is largely about recording what people say and how they say it. ‘This basic principle of news can be expressed as “something is so because someone says it is so” ’ (Fishman, 1980: 92). In news reporting, who is quoted, who is not quoted, why certain quotes are quoted, what reporting mode is used, etc. all have a decisive impact on the news discourse. The western linguistics community began large-​scale analysis of news discourses during the 1970s, and research in this area is more than numerous. However, research on Chinese news discourse has so far been limited to the syntactic level or has focused on the social, cultural and ideological contextual factors that restrict news production, but there is seldom a systematic linguistic and pragmatic study of news discourse at the discourse level. Traditionally, the study of speech reporting has been confined primarily to literary texts, so whenever reported speech is mentioned, one thinks of the formal characteristics and rhetorical functions summarised by stylistics from the quotations of literary texts. However, with the development of non-​ narrative text analysis, it can be seen that the nature and function of reported speech varies according to the type of text. For example, the source of the reported speech in literary texts is often fictitious. However, the authenticity of the sources in a news report is extremely important. Although Bakhtin’s main interest lies in literary texts, he attaches great importance to studying what he terms the ‘rhetorical genres’, including the dialogic role of other people’s discourse in news discourse, political discourse, religious language and legal discourse. Bakhtin believes that the basic difference between discourses in literary works and these rhetorical genres is that the reported speech in the former permeates the author’s ideology, while the reported speech in the latter can resist this manipulation because of its fixity, objectivity and authority, and therefore maintains its relative independence (Volosinov, 1973: 123). The form and function of reported speech can differ in different social and cultural traditions. For example, in the indirect reported speech in many languages, the verb tense in the subordinate or reported clause should be consistent with the verb tense in the main or reporting clause. The tense of the former depends on the latter’s choice of tense. However, there is no such requirement in Japanese and Russian. The tense used in indirect speech can be the same as the tense in the direct speech or the original language (see Barentsen, 1996:  15; Boogaart, 1996:  215). As another example, the verb tense plays a vital role in identifying free indirect speech in Indo-​European languages (such as ‘Flowers? Yes, flowers, since he did not trust his taste in gold…’ [Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway,  124]). However, in Chinese, due to

Introduction to reported speech  43 the lack of tense, the boundary between the narrator’s discourse and the character’s discourse is much less clear than in other languages. As a result, in comparison to Indo-​European languages, the determination of free indirect speech depends on the context to a larger extent. Sometimes, particularly in the case of the first-​person narrative, it is difficult to distinguish between direct speech and free indirect speech even by considering the context (Hagenaar, 1996: 293–​296). Speech reporting in news discourse has such an important role that in some cultures it may even affect the classification of the news discourse. For example, in Chinese news, the domestic classification of news texts has long copied Western traditions. English news discourse can be classified according to different standards, including the communication channel, content, location and scope of the event. Since news discourses must be written by journalists according to different reporting forms or genres, the classification of news genres appears to be more important when linguistically analysing news discourses. Bell (1991) distinguishes four types of news genre:  1) hard news, 2)  feature articles, 3)  special-​topic news, 4)  headlines, crossheads or subheadings, bylines, photo captions. However, there are at least two problems with this classification. Firstly, the classification criteria are inconsistent. Hard news is classified according to the nature of the incident, which refers to objective news facts that are more serious and have a certain timeliness. These facts are directly related to our everyday material life, such as accidents, conflicts, crimes, notices, inventions and discoveries. Feature articles are classified according to the way they are written. Often only the richest features and most expressive parts of the news facts are selected to vividly portray the news in feature articles, thus ensuring that they have a strong impact on the reader (Zhang Jian, 1994:  90). Special-​ topic news is classified by content, including news in sports, business/​finance, art, agriculture, computers, etc. Secondly, the examples listed in the fourth news genre above are generally just the components of a report, and some of them (such as crossheads and bylines) never form a message themselves. Jian Zhang (1994) divides news genres into three categories: news, features and news commentaries. The news is further divided into a single incident report, a comprehensive report, a continuous report and an in-​depth report. We believe that such a classification is not appropriate from the perspective of language analysis because there could be a significant amount of overlapping between these four types of messages, whether in linguistic features or genre features. For example, continuous report involves writing follow-​up reports on important events or people over a certain time period, but each report in it is probably rather similar to a single event report. Besides, it is difficult to see any obvious distinctions between comprehensive reports and in-​ depth reports in terms of language, text or genre. Bin Xin (2007) divides news into two categories from the perspective of speech reporting and discourse dialogicality, namely event news and speech-​reporting news. The former aims to show readers events or phenomena occurring in the outside world,

44  Introduction to reported speech while the latter aims to ‘project’ discourse from important people, power institutions or social organisations. In speech-​reporting news, reporters generally try to avoid giving personal opinions or comments so as to leave the impression that they are being faithful to the original words. The reason for this is not difficult to understand: the discourses that are reported are generally of great social and political significance, and many of these discourses can have a major impact both internationally and domestically. Reporters are therefore generally very serious and cautious when reporting, lest they deviate from the meaning that the speaker wants to express. Speech-​reporting news generally has the following characteristics: 1) the method of reporting is relatively simple, and is based primarily on indirect speech; 2) the style of reporting is rigid, and the reporter adopts a serious attitude and provides few comments; 3) the choice of reporting verbs is relatively narrow, but verbs meaning ‘instruction’, ‘request’ and ‘emphasis’ are relatively more common; 4) the jurisdiction of each reported word is explicit and the boundaries are clear. Speech-​reporting news can be divided into monologues and dialogues according to their degree of dialogicality. Xin Bin’s analysis (2007) shows that the news will produce different degrees of dialogicality depending on the reporting mode adopted. Whether the reporter chooses to report the words of others and how he does so has a direct impact on the dialogicality of the news discourse. However, dialogue and monologue are two relative concepts, being a question of degree, and they ultimately depend on the extent to which the speaker takes into account the existence of the recipient and other voices, and expresses this consideration in the text. Every language has a variety of ways to express the existence of the recipient and other voices in the text that the speaker can choose from; one of the most important methods in news discourse is reported speech.

2.7  Conclusion In this chapter, we have considered reported speech to be a reflexive language, that is, the discourse within the discourse and the discourse about the discourse. Reported speech has long been studied in the fields of western philosophy, linguistics and stylistics, and involves three main aspects: the reporting mode, the reporting verb and the source of information, and these are also the focus of our study. Baynham (1996) suggests that we should pay particular attention to issues such as the following when discussing the function of reported speech: (a) What strategies and linguistic means can be used by speakers to refer to speech act or communication activity in a specific discourse context? (b) What is the function of speech reporting in this discourse context? (c) How are the speech reporting strategies distributed in this discourse context, and in what ways do they constitute the context? We will attempt to answer these questions in subsequent chapters. In addition, language always exists in interpersonal communication and dialogic relationships between people. Language cannot

Introduction to reported speech  45 exist in isolation, separated from the words of other people. By examining reported speech, we can obtain a deeper understanding of the dialogic nature of human discourse.

Notes 1 ‘Home away’ means to ‘go home’ in the dialect used in the Liaocheng area of Shandong. 2 It is generally accepted that Bakhtin is the author of the book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. For further details, please refer to the translator’s foreword in the 1986 English version of the book.

3  The multidimensional research perspective of reported speech

Since ancient Greece, scholars in numerous fields, such as philosophy, logic, rhetoric, stylistics and linguistics have extensively researched the phenomenon of speech reporting from a number of different angles. Each of these disciplines has explored the phenomenon of reporting from the perspective of its own theories, research aims and methodologies. This chapter introduces and summarises various theories and perspectives that are relevant to the study of speech reporting.

3.1  Philosophical perspective Frege’s On Sense and Reference, published in 1892, is the origin of philosophical thinking on reported speech. In his article, which primarily discusses the distinction between sense and reference, Frege became the first person to observe the difference between the speaker’s original discourse and a quotation.1 Recanati (2001: 1–​2) believes that the study of reported speech in philosophy attempts to answer the following three main questions: (1) What is the reference of a quotation? Is it just a verbal expression? Or is it only a carrier? Is it a type or a token? Is it possible to retell its content whilst retaining its form? (2) What does the referring in a quotation? Is it the quotation itself that refers? Or is it the quotation marks that do the referring? (3) What is the role of a quotation? Is it just a description or a demonstrative? The different answers to these questions have formed the basis of several different quotation theories:  the identity theory (Frege, 1892; Washington, 1992), the proper name theory (Quine, 1940), the description theory (Geach, 1950), the demonstrative theory (Davidson, 1979; Cappelen and Lepore, 1997), the demonstration theory (Clark and Gerrig, 1990); Recanati, 2001), the ostension theory (Saka, 1998) and the disquotational theory (Richard, 1986). The identity theory was first proposed by Frege in his article On Sense and Reference, where he highlights that ‘if words are used ordinarily, what one intends to speak of is their reference. However, it can also happen that one

Research perspective of reported speech  47 wishes to talk about the words themselves or their sense. This happens, for instance, when the words of another are quoted. One’s own words then first designate the other speaker’s words, and only the latter have their usual reference. We then have signs of signs. In writing, the words are in this case enclosed in quotation marks. Accordingly, a word standing between quotation marks must not be taken as having its ordinary reference’. (Frege, 1892:  144) This article states the central concept of the identity theory, that is, ‘in quotation, expressions are used to mention themselves’ (Washington, 1992: 583). In other words, a quotation is composed of a set of quotation marks, whose function is to designate, and a linguistic expression, whose function is to mention. When a word is enclosed in quotation marks, it performs a ‘mentioning’ function. The referenced expression is the same as the reference of the quotation, and the referenced expression mentions itself. ‘Whatever its usual syntactic function, the quoted material functions as a singular term; whatever its usual semantic function, in that linguistic environment the quoted material refers to itself’ (Garcia-​Carpintero, 2005: 97). From this point of view, quotation marks are only used to mark words or expressions, thereby indicating that the language expressions within the quotation marks are simply mentioned without denoting or referring to their general meaning as they would when ‘used’ as usual. There is a significant distinction between the two concepts of ‘mention’ and ‘use’ in the field of quotation research. The so-​called ‘use’ represents the use of words to refer to or talk about people or things in reality outside the language, whereas the so-​called ‘reference’ refers to the reflexive use of words, that is, a word that is used to refer to itself. For example, consider (1) ‘He hates Mary’ and (2) ‘He hates “Mary” ’. Sentence (1) shows that ‘he’ hates the person Mary, while sentence (2) indicates that what ‘he’ hates is the word or name ‘Mary’. The proper name theory is derived from Tarski (1933) and Quine (1940). This theory holds that a quotation is the name of the item it refers to, and what performs the referential function is the entire quotation. Names with quotation marks may be treated like single words of a language… The individual constituents of these names fulfil the same function as the letters and complexes of successive letters in single words. Hence they can possess no independent meaning. (Tarski, 1933: 159) Quine holds a similar opinion: From the standpoint of logical analysis each whole quotation must be regarded as a single word or sign, whose parts count for no more that serifs or syllables…The meaning of the whole does not depend upon the meanings of the constituent words. (1940: 26) According to the proper name theory, in quotation, the referential function is performed by the entire quotation, which is in the form of a proper name.

48  Research perspective of reported speech However, what exactly is the quotation referring to? The proper name theory struggles to find an answer. The description theory proposed by Geach (1950) is based on the proper name theory. It proposes that ‘the referenced series of expressions are always the series of referenced expressions’. The description theory adds the concept of ‘basic units’ while retaining the basic idea that the quotation is a proper name. Geach believes that any language has a set of basic units, such as letters, words, etc., which can either describe words letter by letter, or describe the quoted phrases word by word. What the description theory deals with is a finite set of basic units. Thus, quotations are potentially productive. However, because the description theory is based on the proper name theory, it is unable to overcome all the shortcomings of this theory. Davidson (1979) proposes the demonstrative theory on the basis of criticising both the proper name theory and the description theory. The demonstrative theory advances three main points: 1) quotation marks perform the referential or indexical function of referring to the shape of the expression contained within them, so the quotation marks are ‘the expressions exemplified here’; 2) the expression within the quotation marks does not refer to anything; and 3) the quotation marks can be transformed into text and the elements inside them can be removed from the sentence because what is within the quotation marks does not perform any semantic function (see Wang Aihua, 2007: 3). The demonstrative theory is considered to be the most creative theory of twentieth century linguistic philosophy, but its emergence has also caused much controversy. The demonstration theory is proposed by Clark and Gerrig (1990). They maintain that the function of a quotation is as follows: ‘Just as you can demonstrate a tennis serve, a friend’s limp, or the movement of a pendulum, so you can demonstrate what a person did in saying something’ (Clark and Gerrig, 1990: 764). Besides, they also believe that people can implement speech acts in three ways: indicating/​pointing, describing and demonstrating. Indicating points out where things are, with the main function of designating things; describing must use language and focuses on expressing ideological content; demonstrating is not necessarily achieved through language, but it plays the role of ‘enabling others to experience what is depicted’ (ibid: 765). Consider the following example: (4)  a.  She said “well I’d like to buy that suit.” b. She told him uh that she wanted to buy the suit. (Clark and Gerrig, 1990: 764) In 4(a), the speaker is demonstrating to the addressee what the customer did when speaking to the shopkeeper, while in 4(b) the speaker merely describes the customer’s actions and words. From Clark and Gerrig’s point of view, direct speech is a form of display, while indirect speech is deemed to be

Research perspective of reported speech  49 a form of description. In addition, free indirect speech is also a form of display, but one that adopts the perspective of the current speaker or the reporter rather than that of the reported person. Furthermore, they refer to Recanati’s ‘open quotations’ as ‘incorporated quotations’, which are also considered to be a form of display, but at the same time are ‘used’ in the discourse which contains themselves, that is, they both demonstrate and describe. Saka proposes the ostension theory on the basis of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, and he calls his theory ‘the disambiguated ostension theory’. According to his theory, quotation marks indicate that what the speaker is expressing is not the normal denotation of words, but other characteristics that are dependent on the context. Saka calls this Principle Q (quotation). He expresses this idea in the form of ‘use’ and ‘mention’ as follows: (use) Speaker S uses an expression X if and only if (iff): ( i) S exhibits a token of X; (ii) S thereby ostends the multiple items associated with X (including X’s extension); (iii) S intends to direct the thoughts of the audience to the extension of X. (mention) Speaker S mentions an expression X iff: ( i) S exhibits a token of X; (ii) S thereby ostends the multiple items associated with X; (iii) S intends to direct the thoughts of the audience to some item associated with X other than its extension. (Saka, 1998: 126) Saka believes that when using indirect speech, the speaker’s intention is to make the addressee pay attention to the referent of the quotation or the content that the quotation is trying to express, but when using direct speech, the speaker’s intention is to make the addressee pay attention to other related characteristics beside the quotation itself and the content it expresses. As to what characteristics are to be focused on, that will depend on the context. Finally, Saka holds that ‘use and mention are two sides of one coin; although distinct, they implicate one another’ (ibid. 131). Believing the referential theories to be too complicated, Richard (1986) proposes the relatively simpler disquotational theory. In his theory, he presents ‘Richard’s Disquotational Schema’, referred to as DQR (DQR: For any expression E, the left quotation mark (lq) followed by e followed by the right quotation mark (rq) denotes e) (Richard, 1986: 397). According to the disquotational theory, the semantic value of a quotation is the expression enclosed in quotation marks. Quotations are not proper names, descriptive words or demonstrative words, but are instead functions that can change an expression into an argument and assign it a value. The disquotational

50  Research perspective of reported speech theory is probably the simplest and most natural of all the quotation theories. Its DQR schema is straightforward without the need for complicated assumptions about the surface structure of sentences, and is thus an obvious improvement or critique on the demonstrative theory. Although the above seven philosophical views of quotation provide different answers to the three questions of ‘what is referring’, ‘how to refer’ and ‘refer to what’, no view of quotation has been able to fully and reasonably explain the linguistic phenomenon that occurs in reality. The reason is that all the above studies consider still only the structure of the quotation itself while ignoring its connection with the quotation user and the reporting context. Thus, it is impossible to reveal the true nature of the operations of a quotation from this angle.

3.2  Lexical grammar perspective Grammarians have long considered the changes in various forms of reported speech, paying particular attention to providing lexical and syntactic descriptions of these changes. Quirk et  al. (1985:  1020) hold that a relatively more complete speech reporting should generally include two parts: a reporting clause and a reported clause. In addition to introducing the speech reporting, the reporting clause can also indicate the speech or written communicative act of the speaker (Caroline said; Caroline wrote), refer to the listener or the addressee (Caroline told us), clarify the manner of speaking (Caroline said hesitantly) and the environmental factors of these speech acts (Caroline replied; Caroline explained; Caroline said while washing her hair). The reported clause refers to the reported speech itself, appearing in the form of direct speech or indirect speech. In Quirk et al.’s opinion, speech reporting has only two modes: direct speech and indirect speech. Free direct speech and free indirect speech are considered to be subcategories of these two modes, that is, free indirect speech is essentially a subcategory of indirect speech, while free direct speech is a subcategory of direct speech (see Quirk et al., 1985: 1032). Quirk et al. (1985: 1026–​1032) focus on exploring indirect speech and describe the syntactic features of the conversion from direct speech to indirect speech in English from four perspectives: a) ‘Backshifting’ the tense:  after the conversion from direct speech into indirect speech, the tense should be changed from ‘now’ to ‘past’: DIRECT SPEECH    (i) present (ii) past (iii) present perfect (iv) past perfect

BACKSHIFT IN INDIRECT SPEECH

}

→ past → past or past perfect → past perfect (Quirk et al., 1985: 1026)

Research perspective of reported speech  51 b) Other ‘changes’:  pronoun shifts, that is, changing from 1st and 2nd pronouns to 3rd pronouns and nouns; time shifts, such as yesterday → the day before yesterday/​last Monday/​June 10, now → then, next Monday → last Monday/​Monday two weeks ago; location shifts, such as here → there/​there → here. There are also some demonstrative changes between singular and plural forms, such as these → that/​those. c) Changes in the sentence type of indirect speech: English has four indirect speech sentence types, namely declarative, interrogative, exclamatory and imperative sentences. Quirk et  al. (1985:  1029) highlight the syntactic features of these four sentence types when transformed into indirect speech: INDIRECT STATEMENT: that-​clause INDIRECT QUESTION: dependent wh-​clause INDIRECT EXCLAMATION: dependent wh-​clause                        that-​clause INDIRECT DIRECTIVE: to-​infinitive clause (without subject) d) Subjectives and auxiliaries. For an optative subjunctive, ‘may’ or ‘might’ is generally used. Consider the following examples: ( 5)  a.  God bless America! she said. b.  →She expressed the wish that God might bless America. The tense of a mandative subjunctive sentence does not need to be backshifted, for example: ( 6)  a.  “We insisted that he leave at once,” she said. b.  →She said that they (had) insisted that he leave at once. Other past subjunctive and hypothetical subjunctive tense should be backshifted to the perfect past tense. Consider the examples below: ( 7)  a.  “If he were here, he would vote for the motion,” she said. b.  → She said that if he had been there, he would have voted for the motion. ( 8)  a.  “If she stayed another day, he would drive her home,” he said. b.  →He told me the following week that if she had stayed another day, he would have driven her home. The same applies to modal verbs. If the sentence is in the present tense, the tense should be backshifted to the past tense form, as in the following examples:

52  Research perspective of reported speech (9) a. “You may be able to answer this question,” he told her. b.  →He told her that she might be able to answer that question. ( 10) a. “I won’t pay another penny,” I said. b.  →I said that I wouldn’t pay another penny. However, if the modal verb in the direct speech is already in the past tense, there is no need to backshift the tense when converting it into indirect speech: ( 11) a. “You shouldn’t smoke in the bedroom,” he told them. b.  →He told them that they shouldn’t smoke in the bedroom. (12) a. “I could speak Spanish when I was young,” I said. b.  →I said that I could speak Spanish when I was young. (Quirk et al., 1985: 1031) In the above examples, the modal verb still retains its original past form. Dixon (2005) explores the form of verbs used to introduce the complement clause. Every language has a range of verbs that are used to introduce direct speech when reporting what may have been said, such as ‘announce’, ‘tell’, ‘instruct’, ‘ask’, ‘mention’, ‘declare’, etc. in English; these verbs are used to refer to speech events that have taken place. ‘Many languages, including English, have alternative “indirect speech” constructions in which what was said is coded as a subordinate clause –​called a “complement clause” ’ (Dixon, 2005:  36–​37). Dixon summarises the subordinate clauses that are used to report speech in English as shown below: 1. A subordinate clause is introduced by ‘that’, for example: (13) He announced [that Roosevelt had won another election]. 2. An interrogative sentence is changed from direct speech into indirect speech. If it is a special question, the subordinate clause is introduced by a word beginning with ‘wh-​’; if it is a general question, it is introduced by ‘if’ or ‘whether’, for example: (14) John asked [who had left the window open]. (15) Mary asked [whether/​if the Saab was back yet]. 3. The subject of a subordinate clause adopts possessive nouns and the ‘-​ ing’ form of verbs, for example: (16) The office boy mentioned on Tuesday [Mary’s having been late again that morning]. 4. A subordinate clause is an infinitive verb phrase with a logical subject. For example: (17) Captain Smee decided [for Mary to lead the parade]. (18) He instructed me where to put my bag. Some scholars have discussed speech reporting from a transformative-​ generative perspective. For example, Banfield (1973) proposes the

Research perspective of reported speech  53 transformative-​generative structure of grammar on the basis of studying the characteristics of direct speech, indirect speech and free indirect speech. Partee (1973: 410–​411) investigates the syntactic features of speech reporting, with his main concern being a form of direct speech, as in the following example: (19) The other day Tom said to me, “My grandfather was killed with a knife by a bachelor.” In this example, the direct speech is not the direct object of ‘say’, but is embedded as a complete sentence. In addition, Partee (1973) also notices the use of ‘metalanguage’ in speech reporting, for example: ( 20) “I am speaking now” is always true when spoken. (21) “John didn’t answer three of the questions” is ambiguous in my idiolect. (22) “I talk better English than the both of youse!” shouted Charles, thereby convincing me that he didn’t. (23) When you said, “You won’t be able to answer three of the questions,” I guess I took it the wrong way. (Partee, 1973: 416) In the above four examples, examples (20) and (21) do not use a reporting verb. They are somewhat unnatural and, therefore, are rarely used in spoken language. The content enclosed in the quotation marks merely refers to itself, a form of ‘metalanguage’, and this situation is similar to the ‘pure quotations’ or ‘closed quotations’ described in Chapter  2. However, in examples (22) and (23), the quoted parts function in similar ways, both semantically and grammatically, to the other parts to form a complete sentence, and they are what we generally refer to as reported speech or the speech of others. In systemic functional grammar, reported speech is considered to be a projection of logical semantic relations. Halliday (1994/​2000: 250–​213) divides this projection into three different situations. First, a ‘locution’, with a clause projected by another as the wording, such as ‘He said: It is snowing’. Halliday describes this type of locution as being a form of interdependent relationship between clauses, which he terms parataxis, where one clause plays the role of excitation and the other plays the role of inheritance, with both clauses having equal status. Second, an ‘idea’, meaning that a clause is projected as an idea by another, such as ‘He said it was snowing’, with one clause in the primary position and the other clause in the secondary position. Halliday terms this relationship hypotaxis. Finally, a ‘fact’, which includes case, chance, proof and need, as shown in Table 3.1. Halliday holds that ‘locution’ occurs primarily at a lexicogrammatical level, while ‘idea’ occurs mostly at a semantic level. It should be pointed out that in the case of ‘locution’, when quoting the words of others, the author often does not merely seek consistency with the original discourse. When we use ‘direct’ ‘quote’ it implies that we begin to reuse the wording in the original speech event and the ‘projected clause’ does not have to fully adapt to the

54  Research perspective of reported speech Table 3.1 Four types of projection relationships (Halliday 1994/​2000: 256) Taxis Type of Projecting process

Quote paratactic 12

Report hypotactic αβ

Locution “ verbal

wording 1 “2 She said, ‘I can’

Wording represented α “β She said she could

Idea ‘ mental

Meaning represented 1 ‘2 She thought, ‘I can’

Meaning α ‘β She thought she could

mood, reference, register, dialect, etc. of the projecting clause. Consider the following examples: (24) “Well, what about her, your London woman?” she said after they had started to eat. (25) “Speak English,” said Curran. (26) They forget how to deal positively with life, to think and say, “I get it!” (27) Meurig said readily: “He come with me.” (Thompson, 2000: 206–​207) In the above examples, there is no need to match the projected clause with the projecting clause in terms of tense, style or tone, etc. In terms of indirect speech, when ‘reporting’, what we are projecting is not the wording, but the meaning of the original speech event. It differs from direct speech in that the projected clause needs to be well embedded into the projecting clause. For example, the tone must be suitable for the current context and purpose, and must also be in accordance with the current situation in terms of register and other factors. Take the following sentences as examples: ( 28) I asked Moody if he thought other businesses could use Microsoft as a model. (29) He told me to give you the following instructions. Both of the above are examples of indirect speech. The projected clause is integrated with the projecting clause. The projected clause needs to be in accordance with the projecting clause in terms of context, mood, tense, voice and any other aspect. An ‘embedded’ situation also exists, in which the projected clause is neither a verbal process nor a mental process, but a ‘fact’. Consider the following example (Halliday, 1994/​2000: 266): (30) that   Caesar  was   dead   was   obvious    to  all Carrier

Process: relational

Attribute

Receiver

Research perspective of reported speech  55 Table 3.2 Basic categories of projection Locution (verbal)

Idea (mental)

Quote (paratactic)

‘Haven’t seen much of you lately,’ continued John Franklin.

Not I reflected that she would solve my problems for me.

Report (hypotactic)

The report points out that milk fat is mostly saturated fat.

He hoped to goodness that the LA fight would be called soon.

Embedded

All I wanted was an admission [[that she was there]].

Her decision [[to come back]] was to do with Bill.

In this example, ‘Caesar was dead’ is a projection, but there are no verbal or mental processes to project it; its position is merely a fact. It acts as a modifying qualifier of the noun ‘fact’, as in ‘the fact that Caesar was dead was obvious to all’. In either case, one thing is certain, that it is embedded in the sentence. It does not involve any projection process, and therefore there is no paratactic or hypotactic relationship. It is merely embedded in the sentence as a fact: either as the modifying qualifier of the noun ‘fact’ or in its nominalisation form. Thompson (2000: 208) also lists the above three situations as shown in Table 3.2. In addition to the above three situations, Halliday also discusses ‘free indirect speech’. Free indirect speech is described by some as ‘an intermediate product between direct and indirect speech’, but Halliday believes that, strictly speaking, this statement is inappropriate. Compare the following examples: ( 31) Quoted (‘direct’) “Am I dreaming?” Jill wondered. (32) ‘Free indirect’ Was she dreaming, Jill wondered. (33) Reported (‘indirect’) Jill wondered if she was dreaming. The second example above is free indirect speech, which involves the characteristics of both direct speech and indirect speech:  firstly, it is a parallel structure. The projected clause is independent, so it can maintain the original reporting. However, it is not direct speech but indirect speech, so the person, time, etc. must change accordingly, such as ‘Was she dreaming?’; secondly, it can be projected either by the verbal process or the mental process, including all propositional content; thirdly, the intonation of free indirect speech appears to be the same as that of direct speech, without following indirect speech. The projected clause is in an independent position, and the projecting clause immediately follows it as an ending. What is unique about Halliday’s interpretation of reported speech is that he sees reported speech as a ‘projection’, and proposes a series of key categories such as ‘language projection’, ‘mental projection’, ‘quote’ (direct speech), ‘reporting’ (indirect speech), ‘fact’, ‘embedded’, ‘self-​projection’ and other concepts. He also uses ‘verbal process’ and ‘mental process’ to explain various

56  Research perspective of reported speech reporting modes as well as the similarities and differences between them. In this way, Halliday has nicely incorporated speech reporting into his model of systematic functional grammar. On the one hand, he has deepened the research on reported speech from an innovative perspective; on the other hand, he has once again demonstrated the verifiability, systematicness and integrity of his model of systematic functional grammar. Of course, Halliday’s research on reported speech is also somewhat flawed. For example, he does not investigate reported speech in a specific context; there are no substantial differences between the various reporting methods and traditional grammar, as he only employs a few new concepts, similar to ‘old wine in a new bottle’. In addition, Halliday only considers English, so whether or not these methods are suitable for other languages or language families remains to be further discussed. The fields of traditional philosophy and grammar mostly study reported speech from a formalistic perspective, focusing on changes in lexical and grammatical form as well as sentence structure during the conversion of various types of reported speech, but paying little attention to the discourse or pragmatic function of reported speech in a specific context. Volosinov (1973: 128) sharply criticises this ‘mechanical and purely grammatical pattern of changing reported speech from one form to another’. His discussion of various forms of reported speech focuses on their pragmatic and discourse functions, defining reported speech as ‘speech within speech, discourse within discourse, as well as speech about speech and discourse about discourse’ (ibid: 115). In other words, a sentence is separated from the context in which it initially exists and becomes part of the discourse in another context, with contexts implying different times and spaces interacting with one another in the same syntactic structure. Therefore, he especially emphasises the dynamic relationship that exists between reported speech and the reporting context or the speaker’s discourse:  ‘There is a highly complex and tense dynamic relationship between reported speech and reporting context, it is impossible to understand any form of reported speech without considering these relationships’ (ibid: 119). The following perspectives of stylistics, pragmatics and critical discourse analysis have, to some extent, all considered the pragmatic rhetorical function of reported speech.

3.3  Stylistic perspective From a stylistic perspective, reported speech has generally been the focus of literary theorists. For example, it is mentioned in Chapter 2 that reported speech has a central position and significance in Bakhtin’s dialogue theory. During the 1970s, literary stylistics began to consider the various reporting methods used in literary genres, particularly free direct speech and free indirect speech (Banfield, 1973, 1982; Leech and Short, 1981; Shen Dan, 1991; etc.). Of these, Leech and Short’s research (1981:  318–​351) has made the most significant contribution. For the first time, the various types of speech and thought reporting used in prose were systematically investigated from the perspective

Research perspective of reported speech  57 of stylistics. They classified reporting speech into five types:  direct speech, indirect speech, free direct speech, free indirect speech and the narrative report of speech acts (see Chapter  2). Correspondingly, there are also five types of thought reporting: direct thought (DT), indirect thought (IT), free direct thought (FDT), free indirect thought (FIT) and the narrative report of thought acts (NRTA). Leech and Short (1981) believe that direct speech is the ‘normative’ mode of speech reporting, while indirect thought is the ‘normative’ mode of thought reporting, as shown in Figure 3.1. The order of the five reporting methods in Figure  3.1 also reflects the different degrees of the narrator’s involvement in the character’s discourse, as shown in Figure 3.2. On the left most side of the continuum is the narrative report of speech acts  –​the narrator/​reporter has the maximum level of intervention in and control of the report. In this case, the voice of the person being reported that the readers hear is the quietest, while that of the reporter is the loudest. On the right most side of the continuum is free direct speech –​the narrator/​ reporter has the minimum level of intervention in and control of the report, while the person being reported is given the greatest degree of freedom. The voice of the reporter that the readers hear is the quietest, while that of the person being reported is the loudest. In short, each type of reporting method

norm

Speech presentaon

NRSA

IS

FIS

DS

FDS

Thought presentaon

NRTA

IT

FIT

DT

FDT

norm

Figure 3.1 Speech and thought reporting model (Leech and Short, 1981: 344)

Narrator apparently in total control of report

Narrator apparently not in control of report at all

Narrator apparently in paral control of report Variees of speech presentaon

NRSA

IS

FIS

DS

FDS

(NRA=Narrave report of acon, FIS=Free indirect speech)

Figure 3.2 Reporting intervention continuum (Leech and Short, 1981: 324)

58  Research perspective of reported speech has to some degree penetrated the subjective consciousness of the reporter. Of these, direct speech is the most conventional. By moving increasingly to the left on the continuum, the degree to which the author’s subjective consciousness infiltrates the report also gradually increases until, by the time NRSA is reached, the reported person’s voice is almost completely submerged. Which of these options on the continuum the reporter decides to choose or avoid when reporting the words of others ultimately depends on his position and the motivation of the report. Leech and Short’s classification of the above five reporting types is a milestone. It not only distinguishes the types of reported speech, but also subdivides the types of ideology (thought), which helps to compensate for the lack of thought reporting research in previous studies. So, why do Leech and Short examine thought reporting? One important reason is that the corpus they investigated was comprised of literary texts. In order for these texts to vividly portray characters, giving each one a distinctive personality, authors naturally tend to incorporate a wide range of spoken dialogues and thoughts among protagonists in their writing. These thoughts are only accessible to oneself in real life, but the author is thus granted the ‘unique’ power of allowing him/​her to freely enter the ideological world of people to enrich texts and characters. Short (1988), Short et  al. (2002) and Semino and Short (2004) not only expanded the above corpus to include newspapers, but also the style of spoken language. They established a spoken corpus and examined the types of expression used for speech, writing and thoughts. They also examined the relationship between reporting and authenticity (see Short et al., 2002) by using a five-​point model of reporting. During the 1980s, stylistics research was first conducted on speech and thought reporting modes by using a corpus-​based approach. Research into reporting styles began to include spoken discourse as well as the original written discourse, and corpora were expanded to include applied texts as well as literary texts. Scholars compared these reporting styles by using a five-​point model of reporting, and undertook in-​depth research into the various aspects of reporting as corpus analysis became increasingly more advanced. Thompson (2000) uses the COBULID English corpus, which contains rich text types and genres. Some other studies, including Roeh and Nir (1990), Slembrouck (1992), Caldas-​Coulthard (1994), Waugh (1995), etc., have started to focus specifically on non-​literary texts to investigate the phenomenon of reporting in different genres. Thomas and Short (1996) use a corpus-​based approach to study reporting speech, but the corpus used is rather small, containing only 88,631 words/​letters derived primarily from four genres: ‘high’ literature, popular fiction, broadsheet newspapers and tabloid newspapers, but they later published results from other genres. In fact, the earliest method using a corpus comes from Leech. It is Leech and Short (1981) that took the lead in classifying and interpreting reporting speech in a real corpus. This research provided Short and other researchers with the inspiration to conduct further studies in this area. Compared to traditional stylistic research, a corpus-​based approach has a number of specific advantages. It often involves: 1) developing

Research perspective of reported speech  59 a set of ST & WP annotations and the formation of a standardised annotation system; 2) testing and improving the ST & WP category to see whether all the examples in the corpus can be tested and interpreted, not just identified, or to find the interesting examples; 3) comparing the ST & WP in different genre texts; 4) identifying and classifying the more complex and mixed forms of ST & WP in various genres; 5) determining the frequency and degree of ambiguity of different categories; and 6) establishing a free annotation corpus (see Wynne et al., 1998: 245). Short et  al. (1996:  111–​112) propose the following research goals of a corpus-​ based method:  a) testing Leech and Short’s (1981) classification patterns (S & TP); b) discussing the similarities and differences between literary and non-​literary texts in the S & TP category; c) attempting to examine the reporting phenomenon from a discourse/​speech perspective (although the recognition of S & TP should be based on vocabulary and grammar, it also depends on the pragmatics and contextual factors used); d) opening up new research directions in stylistics and corpus linguistics; and e) exploring the possibility of automatic syntactic parsing in the S & TP category. Short (1996: 219–​222) believes that a good theory of reporting speech should involve at least four characteristics, namely, 1) coverage: its definition of the reporting category should be as comprehensive as possible; 2)  integrity:  it should explain all reporting phenomena as comprehensively as possible; 3) relationship: it should indicate the relationship between reported speech and context as far as possible; 4) verifiability: in terms of the definition and meaning of categories, it should be clear and observable, so that others can test and make further corrections on this basis.

3.4  Pragmatic perspective Since the 1970s, with the development and maturity of pragmatics and discourse analysis theory, many scholars have begun to study speech reporting from the perspectives of pragmatics and rhetoric, exploring the form and function of speech reporting in various contexts and achieving fruitful results. In fact, Bakhtin was one of the first scholars to study reporting speech from the perspective of pragmatics. As he highlights, one of the most fundamental mistakes made by previous studies is ignoring the dynamic relationship between reporting speech and the ‘reporting context’, that is, between the speech being reported and the speech doing the reporting, or between the other’s speech and the author’s speech. Bakhtin believes that this dynamic relationship has two main developmental trends. Firstly, a basic ‘linear style’, in which the speech being reported maintains its authenticity and integrity, the boundary between the author’s speech and the other’s speech is clear and direct speech is generally used. Secondly, a ‘pictorial style’ also exists. ‘Language continues to produce more incisive and better ways to express various emotional colors, injecting interjections and comments into the others’ words’ (Bakhtin 1998: 473), so that the boundary between ‘the other’s

60  Research perspective of reported speech speech’ and ‘the author’s speech’ becomes blurred. The main form of a pictorial style is indirect speech. The author’s speech and the other’s speech are interpenetrated, merged and communicated, and the entire style tends to be more open and diverse. Sternberg (1982a, 1982b) expounds speech reporting from the perspective of Speech Act Theory (SAT). Speech reporting is essentially a speech act. According to SAT, speech reporting belongs to the representative speech act category distinguished by Searle (2001). It is a form of correspondence between the speech and the world, i.e. a reporting speech act used to represent the speech of others. Sternberg believes that all reported speech is a type of ‘mimesis’ of the reported discourse. Sternberg (1982a:  108) points out that ‘reporting is mediation, mediation is intervention’; that is, whether direct speech or indirect speech is used, as long as it is stripped from the original context and re-​contextualised in a new network, it will inevitably cause an intervention effect. In addition, Sternberg explains the many-​to-​many relationship between the presented ‘formal features’ and representative features from the perspective of SAT. Since the 1990s, research on speech reporting has placed more emphasis on the discourse perspective. With the increasing number of linguistic theories, such as pragmatics, discourse analysis, functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics, researchers soon realised that, on its own, syntactic analysis was simply not enough. Instead, they needed to turn to speech or discourse, focusing on the form and function of speech reporting. Thompson (1996: 502) classifies speech reporting into two categories, ‘structural’ and ‘functional’, pointing out that ‘reporting should be studied from the functional rather than the structural perspective’. In his research framework (see Thompson, 1996: 507), when an original speech event is reported, the following features are generally involved: sound (who or what is speaking as the reporting source), information (the content or mode of action of the original speech event), signal (the reporting mode used by the narrator) and attitude (evaluation of the narrator or the original speaker). Collins (2001) also points out that the study of reported speech should not be limited to the scope of traditional syntax, but should be discussed from the perspective of discourse analysis. There are no strict boundaries between the various modes of reporting, but instead they form a continuum. Deviations in reporting are caused by pragmatic needs. Chinese scholars have gradually begun to realise the importance of studying speech reporting from a pragmatic perspective. Dan Shen (1991) specifically discusses the use of free indirect speech in literary works. In addition to the three roles identified by the last researcher, namely muting the author, crossing space time and psychological time and expressing the stream of consciousness, Dan Shen adds three other functions: ‘effectively expressing or strengthening the effect of sarcasm’, ‘enhancing empathy’ and ‘increasing semantic density’. Zhongheng Jia (2000) takes the language segment positioned adjacent to the quotation as the focus of his study, and analyses its characteristics from three different perspectives: form, semantics and pragmatics. He distinguishes

Research perspective of reported speech  61 between the quotation and the original speaker’s speech and identifies the pragmatic differences between them. Bin Xin (2010:  67) believes that ‘it is far from enough to formally and semantically analyse the quotation. What is more important is to analyse the rhetorical function of the quotation in the text, the interrelationships between quotations of various reporting modes in the same text and the resultant communicative effect from the pragmatic perspective’. He also proposes that reported speech should be studied from a new ‘dialogical’ perspective, and more attention should be paid to the ‘dialogical characteristics’ of the text. In addition to literary texts, in recent years scholars have paid increasing attention to the function of reported speech in academic and news texts. The study of reported speech in academic papers has long been an area of interest for scholars (e.g. Charles, 2006; Gilbert, 1977; Hawes and Thomas, 1997; Hunston, 1993, 1995; Hyland, 1999, 2002a, 2002b; Jacoby, 1987; Malcolm, 1987; Shaw, 1992; Swales, 1986, 1990; Thompson and Tribble, 2001; Thompson and Ye, 1991; Canwen He, 2001). They mainly study the features and functions of reported speech used in academic papers. Although the rules and conventions governing academic quotations have become more specialised and standardised, some situations are still difficult to explain, such as:  (1) the reason why some reporting modes appear frequently in particular parts of an academic paper, while some reporting modes are rarely, if at all, used; (2) some forms of reporting cannot be distinguished and it is impossible to determine whether they are reporting; or (3) whether the different reporting modes used by the author have different pragmatic meanings, etc. News texts always use various forms of reported speech, and thus have been the focus of much academic research (for example, Caldas-​ Coulthard, 1994; Fairclough, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c; Short, 1988; Slembrouck, 1986, 1992; van Dijk, 1988a; Waugh, 1995). The veracity of speech reporting –​ that is, whether the reported speech is consistent with the original speech –​is a fundamental issue in news discourse. Besides, the focus is on control and power in the speech reporting process, specifically the critical role played by reported speech in ideological manipulation, which involves choosing the reported speech mode –​which reporting mode should be chosen? Why is this reporting mode used instead of another reporting mode? Another aspect worth discussing is the attitude of narrators/​reporters towards the reported speech and their evaluation of it. Narrators/​reporters regard reporting to be an important evaluative resource. In many cases, the author’s evaluation of reported speech is generally implicit. Waugh (1995) studies reported speech in news discourse from a functional perspective, as it is his belief that discourse should be studied under real conditions. He holds that the discourse type/​ genre, such as news discourse, has a preset framework. By using this framework, Calsamiglia and Ferrero (2003) specifically study the voices of experts in news discourse, and find that journalists use speech from scientific communities not only to establish authority but also to legalise or rationalise the described conflicts. Sai-​Hua Kuo (2001) studies reported speech in Chinese political discourse by using the Taipei Mayoral Debate of 1998 as a corpus

62  Research perspective of reported speech and finds that direct speech not only has rhetorical effects such as increasing improvisation and vividness, but also helps to achieve interpersonal functions. The speaker uses it as an ‘evasion’ strategy during the debate to disassociate himself from certain matters. Direct speech also helps to achieve different speech styles. Scollon (1997) uses the same news story as a benchmark to compare the use of reported speech in 14 Chinese and English discourses. He then makes extensive comparisons of the many variables, such as page placement, headlines, textual frames, point of views, tones, quotations, formulae and vocabulary, that are related to this genre in different versions of Chinese and English newspapers issued by the same news agency over five consecutive days (Scollon, 2000). Although Scollon attempts to conduct a comparative study of news discourse in Chinese and English newspapers, he seldom refers to reported speech. The majority of research has focused on written discourse, with some scholars later turning their attention to spoken discourse (Bolden, 2004; Buttny, 1997, 1998, 2000; Holt, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2007; Lauerbach, 2006; Myers, 1999; Tannen, 1988, 1989). Holt (1996: 221) believes that there is still a lack of real and systematic ‘interaction’ research, be it ‘invented’ examples or fragments in novels. He advocates studying reported speech in interactive conversations under real conditions by taking telephone conversations, conversations between company employees and interactive conversations as sources to study the characteristics and functions of reported speech, particularly direct speech, in spoken language. Buttny stresses that attention should be paid to the dynamic relationship that exists between the reported context and reported speech. According to Bakhtin’s (1981) view, reported speech can be termed ‘double-​voiced discourse’, which reflects the ‘double voice feature’ of the original speaker and the current speaker. This also leads to three interpretations of the context: the ‘original context’; the ‘context of the story world’, which is the target context that reported speech is to be transplanted into; and the ‘reporting context’, that is, the interactional context between the narrator/​reporter and the interlocutor. The context should not only be seen as background knowledge; it constantly changes with the participants, and the context can keep readers interested and provide guidance on how people should read and understand what they are confronted with. Besides daily conversations, Buttny (1997, 1998) and Buttny and Williams (2000) study the characteristics of the reported speech of campus students and company employees when discussing racial issues. Baynham (1996) points out that traditional syntactic interpretation presets a mechanical conversion between the original language and a series of ‘decontextualised’ direct and indirect speech, analyses the reported speech in a specific context from a pragmatic perspective and emphasises its rhetorical effect. But linguistics, pragmatics and literary theory all ignore the fact that they presuppose a narrative discourse framework. Therefore, Baynham advocates studying non-​narrative discourse, using adult mathematics classroom speech as the corpus of investigation to explore the form and role of direct speech in a non-​narrative style.

Research perspective of reported speech  63 Myers (1999) explores the use of reported speech in group discussions, and Lauerbach (2006) discusses the issue of identity construction in political interviews. Baynham and Slembrouck (1999) study reported speech in institutional discourse. They believe that there is a type of ‘narrative bias’ in the study of speech reporting, which is mainly confined to the literary narrative genre but should go beyond the discourse and context to expand horizontally. Slembrouck (1992) discusses the written construction of verbal discourse in the meeting records of the British Parliament. Hall et  al. (1999) also study speech interaction among experts and between experts and clients in the field of social work. Using Benshan Zhao’s comic sketch as an example, Bin Xin (2012) discusses the dramatic effect of reported speech in oral communication.

3.5  Critical Discourse Analysis perspective The Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) perspective of reported speech aims to explain and expose the ideological meaning behind the choice of reporting mode by focusing on various reporting phenomena in news discourse. Fairclough (1988, 1992a, 1992b, 1995a) was the first scholar to study reported speech from the perspective of CDA. He realised that reported speech is an ‘intertextuality’ that implies some ideological meaning. Fairclough (1988: 125–​ 135) believes that there is a dynamic relationship between ‘primary discourse’/​ the reporting clause and ‘secondary discourse’/​the reported discourse. The relationship shows two trends: (1) the boundary between the two discourses (clauses) becomes apparent, and (2) the boundary between the two discourses (clauses) is ambiguous and shows a tendency to merge. There are varying degrees of ‘interference’ in both trends, with the narrator using their various meanings for different communicative purposes. Fairclough also proposes four parameters of ‘discourse representation’ on the basis of Voloshinov (1973):2 ‘mode’, ‘boundary maintenance’, ‘stylisticity’ and ‘setting’. Furthermore, he believes that the extent to which secondary discourse is related to primary discourse should be studied. Fairclough (1992a, 1992b) also applies theory to practice, analyses specific discourses and turns the concept of ‘intertextuality’ into an operational approach to discourse analysis. He categorises ‘manifest intertextuality’ into three types: ‘sequential intertextuality’, ‘embedded intertextuality’ and ‘mixed intertextuality’. Caldas-​Coulthard (1992) studies the stylistic and ideological nature of reported speech in narrative discourses and compares the differences between reported speech in news events and in literature. For example, speeches in news events are facts, but the speeches in a novel are fabricated by the author. He also discusses the similarities and differences between the speech in written and spoken language, which are due to the linear structure of discourse. To be transferred into written discourse, the ‘tidiness’ of the speech must be considered. The resultant speech is a ‘cleaned-​up’, ‘reduced’ and ‘simplified’ version. He also points out that the author has complete control over the articles he writes, and therefore has a full range of options. In a complete dialogue, he chooses to report the views that

64  Research perspective of reported speech he considers to best match and serve his purposes, reserving other views to fulfil different functions or to serve as an embellishment. Other scholars, such as Günthner (1999), Holt (1996, 1999, 2000), Kandil (2009), Obiedat (2006), Pounds (2010), Salama (2011), Bin Xin (1998, 1999, 2000b, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2012), etc., have carried out relevant research from a number of different perspectives. Recently, both Chinese and foreign academics have realised the importance of corpus technology in Critical Discourse Analysis. Combining corpus methods with CDA has been a new research field in CDA. Of course, some scholars have conducted related research from other perspectives, such as psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics (see Jianwu Peng, 2003; Hirst et al., 1984).

3.6  Conclusion Speech reporting is such an essential linguistic phenomenon that we should, inevitably, involve and look at any theory that attempts to describe and explain language and its application. This chapter only summarises the study of reported speech from the perspectives of philosophy, lexical grammar, stylistics, pragmatics and CDA. Some of the more important perspectives that we have not specifically discussed here include at least systemic functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics, although we briefly introduced the former in Section 3.2. Regarding the latter, we provide a simple reference and application in the corpus analysis of Chapter  9. In addition, although we have discussed five perspectives one by one, there are no clear boundaries between them. Therefore, in subsequent chapters, we intend to analyse and discuss our corpus from either a single perspective or multiple perspectives simultaneously. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, scholars in a number of fields have conducted fruitful research on reported speech. The main manifestations of this research are: shifting away from traditional syntax to focus on the pragmatic rhetorical function of reported speech; expanding the range of texts being studied, from literary texts to non-​literary corpora, such as the study of academic texts and news discourses; not only studying written discourses but paying increasing attention to reported speech in a real corpus such as spoken language, conversations, etc. All these developments have further deepened our understanding of reported speech. However, the study of reported speech still has some shortcomings. For example, there exist many foreign studies but little Chinese studies, many studies on foreign languages but little on the Chinese language, much referencing to foreign theories but few to Chinese theory construction, many scattered studies but few systematic studies, many static studies but few studies on the dynamic relationship with context, many studies using specific events as the background for their research but few diachronic studies, many studies on the text itself but few studies on the interaction between text and society, many studies on a single language but few studies on cross-​language comparisons, many studies on a

Research perspective of reported speech  65 single text but few studies using a corpus; as far as CDA is concerned, many qualitative analyses but few quantitative and qualitative combined studies. Given all these factors, we will use a corpus-​based approach in the following chapters to compare the language and pragmatic differences in Chinese and English newspapers from the range of perspectives summarised in this chapter. We aim to reveal the ideology and the social and cultural reasons for the differences observed in the language and ideology of these two languages, with the intention of helping readers to improve their ability to critically read news discourse.

Notes 1 In philosophical studies, reported speech is usually referred to as ‘quotation’. 2 CDA also often refers to ‘reported speech’ as ‘discourse representation’ or ‘discourse manifestation’.

4  Reported speech in Chinese news headlines

In literature and stylistics, Leech and Short’s (1981) classification of reported speech is frequently referred to –​namely, direct speech (DS), indirect speech (IS), free direct speech (FDS), free indirect speech (FIS) and the narrative report of speech acts (NRSA). However, in actual discourse, particularly in news discourse, reporting is much more complicated than this classification. As Waugh (1995:  163) notes, although there is a clear distinction between direct and indirect speech in news discourse, ‘each type of reported speech represents a continuum –​much shorter for direct speech which allows some (controlled) rewordings, editings, stylizings; and much longer for indirect speech, which as we have seen allows the reporter much freedom of formulation’. Therefore, reported speech has many variations in news discourse and performs a diverse range of functions, regardless of whether it is direct or indirect speech. This chapter first examines the form and function of reported speech in the headlines of a limited corpus of Chinese newspapers. Then, a comparative analysis of the reporting modes used in the headlines of Chinese and English newspapers is conducted.

4.1  Corpus and statistical results Waugh (1995:  131) believes that the pragmatic study of news discourse should, as far as possible, be based on real corpora, using both ‘closed corpora’ and ‘open corpora’. ‘Closed corpus’ refers to the whole corpus of a particular copy, several copies or the entire corpus of a specific layout to obtain a statistically useful trend or reliable prototype. ‘Open corpus’ refers to the collecting of new, different or rare examples of the phenomenon being studied by continuously examining the same corpus source, to repeatedly test or revise the assumptions or conclusions being made. The corpus analysed in this chapter is taken from four Chinese newspapers published on a total of 12  days):  Guangming Daily on 25–​29 September 2011, Xinhua Daily on 20, 26, 27 and 29 September 2011, Modern Express on 28 September 2011 and 2 November 2011 and Nanjing Morning News on 28 September 2011. For reference, we also examine two English newspapers: 12 front page articles from The Sunday Telegraph over three consecutive months (August, September and

Reported speech in Chinese news headlines  67 October 2004)  and part of the articles from The Daily Express from 21 to 29 July 2011 and August 2011. Our choice of corpus is basically random, but at the same time we take into consideration the continuity and coverage of the corpus. For example, we selected Guangming Daily from five consecutive days, The Sunday Telegraph from 12 consecutive Sundays and the corpus of Xinhua Daily and Modern Express contains newspapers separated in date by a few days or months. Samples selected from the Daily Express are both continuous and discontinuous. A total number of 1,612 headlines from the 12 Chinese newspapers are analysed in this chapter, of which 399 contain quotations, accounting for approximately 25 per cent of the total number of headlines; some headlines contain more than two quotations, giving a total of 464 quotations. Of these, 75 are actual reporting of speeches given by other people, involving 66 headings, which accounts for 16.5 per cent of the total number of headings containing quotation marks. The remaining quotations are either pure quotations, closed quotations or scare quotes mentioned above. Although the proportion of these quotations is small, headings using the reported speech can reflect the appearance, form and pragmatic function of reported speech in news headlines. In Chinese, quotation marks primarily refer to: 1) direct quotations of the words of other people; 2)  objects that are specifically discussed; 3)  proper nouns; 4) words with special meaning; 5) irony or negation; and 6) sayings, idioms, proverbs, allegorical sayings, old sayings, etc. In the news headlines we exam, the majority of quoted words belong to categories (2) through (6). For example: ( 1) Follow “Tiangong No. 1” (Guangming Daily, 27 September 2011) (2) More attention needs to be paid to the “inner ghost” in Accountability (Xinhua Daily, 20 September 2011) (1) and (2)  are examples of categories (3)  and (4), respectively. This article focuses on the first form of usage, which we call ‘reported speech’. Since the other five categories account for a large proportion of the use of quotation marks in Chinese, we will briefly discuss these first. Also, although these five categories have different semantic functions, they also have something in common, that is, they draw the reader’s or addressee’s attention to the components within the quotation marks. Therefore, these can be referred to as scare quotes.

4.2  Scare quotes ‘Scare quotes’ refer to the individual words that are placed within quotation marks in narrative discourse or other forms of indirect reporting. Clark and Gerrig (1990) call these quotations ‘incorporated quotations’. Waugh (1995:  146–​149) refers to them as ‘combined direct/​indirect speech’, and points out that the material being quoted does not necessarily appear in the

68  Reported speech in Chinese news headlines form of sentences, but can appear as merely words or phrases embedded in more indirect speeches. Thompson (1996:  311–​313) considers this phenomenon to be ‘partial quotes’, believing that they often appear in IS and NRSA. Semino and Short (2004:  153–​159) call scare quotes ‘quotations’ to distinguish them from other ‘presentations’. They study the use of ‘quotations’ in three types of text: novels, autobiographies and newspapers. Statistical results show that the majority of ‘quotations’ appear in newspaper texts, accounting for 54 per cent of the total number of ‘quotations’ in these three categories. If pure quotations, mixed quotations, closed quotations and open quotations are classified according to their form or structure, then ‘scare quotes’ are primarily explained in terms of their function. Semino and Short (2004:  55) believe that scare quotes can highlight certain words in the original language and avoid lengthy citations, thus making news reports more concise and vivid. Saka (2005:  192–​193) is concerned with the ‘distance’ effect produced by the use of scare quotes, believing that scare quotes direct hearers to the selected words themselves, which can express sentiments such as ‘Don’t forget that this is terminology’, ‘I realise that the language used here is not strictly correct’, ‘This is slang which I don’t approve of’ and so on. Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 56) also believe that scare quotes are the most important way of expressing ‘distance’. Garcia-​Carpintero (2005:  101) collectively refers to mixed quotes, scare quotes, etc. as ‘double-​duty quotations’. The components within the quotation marks are both ‘mentioned’ and ‘used’. Although scare quotes often appear in IS and NRSA, they are not necessarily quoted from a specific source, such as: (3) “Sanbao” (three treasures) of Peking Union Medical College Hospital (Guangming Daily, 25 September 2011) (4) To grab the sweetness, be sure to avoid planting “sour grapes” (Xinhua Daily, 26 September 2011) In example (3), ‘Sanbao’ refers to professors, medical records and libraries in Peking Union Medical College Hospital, and ‘sour grapes’ in example (4)  also has a particular meaning. In some languages, cautious speakers often use different symbols to indicate scare quotes and reported speech. For example, in American English, single quotation marks or italics are used to indicate scare quotes, and double quotation marks are used to refer to the words of other people (see Cappelen and Lepore, 2005: 57). A relatively simple form of scare quotes is used in Chinese newspapers, and these quotes are almost always indicated by double quotation marks. However, the function of scare quotes is flexible, and can sometimes involve multiple meanings or functions. For example: (5) “Suboptimal sexual happiness” plagues nearly 70% of Internet users (Guangming Daily, 25 September 2011) (6) “Prominent son”, or prominent harm (Xinhua Daily, 20 September 2011)

Reported speech in Chinese news headlines  69 ‘Suboptimal sexual happiness’ and ‘prominent son’ in these two examples are the objects or phenomena being discussed in the two reports, but they also both have a special meaning. In example (5), ‘suboptimal sexual happiness’ imitates the phrase ‘suboptimal health’. It refers to a state between satisfaction and dissatisfaction or between happiness and unhappiness with a couple’s sexual life, and generally implies ‘unsatisfactory’ or ‘unhappy’. The ‘prominent son’ in example (6) means ‘second generation of the rich or the officials’. In fact, the function of scare quotation marks is often merely a matter of focus. For example, in (5) and (6), the quotation marks focus more on the objects of the discussion, while in the following examples, they focus on particular meanings: (7) In the scramble for oil and gas resources1 the Eastern Mediterranean becomes “muddy” (Guangming Daily, 25 September 2011) (8) Near the end of the year, job seekers and employers are playing “small abacus” (Modern Express, 19 December 2011) (9) UAV competition, “Avatar” becomes a reality (Modern Express, 28 September 2011) In example (7), ‘muddy’ means that the situation is complicated and chaotic; in example (8), ‘playing “small abacus” ’ means ‘playing tricks’; and in example (9), ‘Avatar’ refers to the ‘Cruiser’ bi-​rotor aircraft designed by students at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, which is similar in shape to the aircrafts in the film ‘Avatar’. In the case of scare quotes, their main function is to express ‘distance’, indicating that the speaker does not recognise, support or agree with the words enclosed in the quotation marks or the meaning of the expression. News reports pursue authenticity and objectivity. Reporters tend to avoid directly expressing their positions and attitudes in words, and thus scare quotes have become a common method by which reporters can communicate their partiality. For example: (10) Experts pour cold water on the “national studies fever” It is only right for “great” people to publish small books (Xinhua Daily, 27 September 2011) (11) It is only 55 metres away, but has to be transported by car from 154 kilometres away “Each step is money” for British prisoners (Modern Express, 28 September 2011) The quotation marks in example (10) indicate that the reporter has reservations and the quotation marks in example (11) are a form of ‘sarcasm’. In both cases, the reporters are expressing negative attitudes. Scare quotes can also be used to express a positive attitude: (12) Baoying:  people’s livelihood projects can only hear “applause” after listening to the “people’s voice” (Xinhua Daily, 27 September 2011)

70  Reported speech in Chinese news headlines Whether the attitude being expressed is positive or negative, the scare quotes in news headlines often perform obvious rhetorical functions, such as metaphors, metonyms, hyperboles, puns, homophones, etc. With the proper use of scare quotes, news headlines can become livelier and more concise. For example: ( 13) In October, feel the power of “Mei” (Modern Express, 28 September  2011) (14) Railway police sweeps away ticket scalpers like the “autumn wind” (Xinhua Daily, 27 September 2011) In example (13), ‘Mei’ refers to the Taiwanese singer Huimei Zhang, but is also a homophone of ‘charm’ in Chinese. The word ‘Mei’ is homonymous, making the whole headline livelier and more interesting. The ‘autumn wind’ in example (14) is a metaphor for the action taken by police against ticket scalpers, enabling the reader to immediately feel the strength and effect of this action. Of course, if used incorrectly or in an overly exaggerated fashion, a scare quote can become self-​defeating. Consider the following examples: (15) “Millions of Female Anchors” began closed training (Modern Express, 28 September 2011) (16) The 2012 job search for graduates is about to start Colleges are more active in “selecting sons-​ in-​ law to marry their daughters” (Xinhua Daily, 20 September 2011) (17) Various gatherings on “Bachelor’s Day” to “get naked” (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) (18) Putin announces participation in the election for the next president of Russia, wanting to change “Medvedev-​Putin” into “Putin-​Medvedev” “Comrade alliance” will take turns residing the Kremlin (Xinhua Daily, 26 September 2011) In example (15), ‘Millions of Female Anchors’ is the name of a program jointly produced by Nanjing TV Station and YouKu. In this case, it refers to the 16 beautiful women who eventually won the show, and is an exaggerated boast. In example (16), comparing colleges graduating their students to ‘choosing sons-​in-​law to marry their daughters’ is somewhat condescending and far-​fetched. In example (17), the paronomasia of ‘get naked’ (which also means getting rid of singleness) is merely trying to be novel but is rather vulgar. In example (18), the ‘comrade alliance’ (comrade can also homosexuals) can lead to negative associations.

4.3  Direct speech In French, quotation marks and italics are used to denote direct speech from a specific source. In English and Chinese, quotation marks are the primary indication of direct speech, but this does not mean that only the words within

Reported speech in Chinese news headlines  71 the quotation marks are direct speech. In the corpus we investigate, it can be seen that there are three direct forms of reported speech in the headlines of Chinese newspapers, as detailed in the following sections. 4.3.1  The entire headline is direct speech Of the 67 headlines containing reported speech, 20 headlines belong to this category, occupying a relatively high percentage, with a considerable number of these headlines having subheadings. For example: ( 19) “I don’t mind letting you see” (Xinhua Daily, 20 September 2011) (20) “Every day I  wake up and think this is fake” (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) (21) “Let’s help the patient more” Zhao Yupei, President of Peking Union Medical College Hospital, talks about public hospital reform2 (Guangming Daily, 25 September 2011) In general, such headlines are quoted from the words spoken by the main characters in the reports. They are lively and concise in form, and often summarise the main purpose or content of the report. A  subheading usually appears after the main headline, and explains the source or topic of the reported speech, as in example (21) above, or provides other information about the original context, such as the occasion on which the speech was given: ( 22) “To live is to serve the people” A side note on the training of the academic research class of the Central Organization Department in 2011 (Guangming Daily, 26 September 2011) (23) “Send a book mountain is better than send gold or silver mountains” A Summary of the Achievements in the Construction of Village Book House (Guangming Daily, 26 September 2011) The main headline in example (22) is quoted from Xuesen Qian and the subtitle indicates the time when this sentence was reported (2011). The subtitle also highlights the key point of the ‘side note’. The direct words in example (23) are the words of a farmer during an interview about the Achievements in the Construction of Village Book House, which the reporter then uses as the subject of the report in an attempt to get straight to the point. 4.3.2  Part of the headline is direct speech This type of headline is basically a mixed quotation, which is classified by De Brabanter (2005) as a ‘hybrid quotation’. Direct speech appears in either the main headline or the subtitle. The remainder of the headline generally provides the source of the message or other contextual information, such as the timing or purpose of the original words. For example:

72  Reported speech in Chinese news headlines ( 24) UK expenditure in Libya exceeds six times the budget The Shadow Cabinet National Defense Minister claims “quite ridiculous” (Modern Express, 28 September 2011) (25) Weibo rumors “Girls can save their lives by remembering these 14 tips” The “Uncle” police says that a few of these tips need revising (Modern Express, 28 September 2011) Bearing in mind how the word ‘cheng’ (claim) is used in Chinese, (for example, ‘lian shen cheng hao’ [constantly say it is good], ‘ren cheng zhi duo xing’ [regarded to be very smart by people, etc.]), the part of the sentence after the word ‘claims’ in example (24) belongs to the category of closed quotations described by Recanati. Example (25) is considered to be an open quotation, or a mixed quotation by Cappelen and Lepore, that is, it maintains the analysability of its internal semantic and syntactic features while completing the same semantic and syntactic functions. In terms of the meaning of the entire headline, example (25) belongs to the category of ‘non-​ cumulated’ open quotations described by Recanati. The quoter deliberately maintains distance from the content of the quotation, which can be seen in the second part of the headline. Example (26) below is an ‘accumulated’ open quotation: (26) It attracts many big-​name projects. Will the hot springs be enough in the future? Don’t worry, Tangshan Hot Springs “have the potential to be dug” (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) The words ‘don’t worry’ in the headline indicate that the quoter agrees with the content of the quotation. As for the ‘Shu shu’ (uncle/​broom-​corn) in the subtitle of example (26), a quotation like this has been called a ‘scare quote’ previously, but in this case it refers to a particular term. 4.3.3  Direct speech after the colon In Chinese texts, a colon is generally used to introduce the following texts. When that text is reported speech, the words appearing before the colon are either the source of the quotation, or the source of the quotation in conjunction with ‘say, think, is, prove, announce, point, request, disclosure, etc.’ or other words that express speech or thoughts. For example: (27) Yao Hongyu: “I have always felt that I should serve the country through industry” (Guangming Daily, 28 September 2011) (28) In July this year, the operator of the Shanghai Metro vowed: “Even if the metro train is driven in the wrong direction, it will never be rear-​ ended” (Nanjing Morning News, 28 September 2011)

Reported speech in Chinese news headlines  73 Reported speech after the colon is usually in the form of direct speech with quotation marks, as in examples (27) and (28), but there are also some occasions when quotation marks are not used. For example: (29) Yang Zi:  Don’t scold me just because I  am a rich second generation. (Nanjing Morning News, 28 September 2011) (30) Jia Pingwa:  Another understanding of Prose (Guangming Daily, 25 September 2011) The first person pronoun ‘I’ in example (29) indicates that the colon is followed by Yang’s original words. Example (30) cannot be judged to be direct speech from its form, but the text indicates that ‘another understanding of prose’ are Jia’s original words, that is, ‘I just said, I  meant I  have another understanding of prose’. The reporter intercepts the last few words of this sentence and uses them in the headline. A  headline like example (30) can easily be confused with the following two examples: (31) Xiong Chengji:  The Forerunner of Wuchang (Xinhua Daily, 29 September 2011) (32) Suzhou Uprising: Announcement of Jiangsu’s separation from the Qing government (Xinhua Daily, 20 September 2011) The difference between the above two examples and example (30) is that the components before the colon in the former express the topic rather than the source of the message. If the colon is removed, the entire headline then forms a ‘topic + narrative’ structure, and expresses the main theme or core idea of the news report. Adding direct speech after the colon also often appears in subtitles. Direct speech sometimes provides background information for the main headline, as in example (33), and sometimes provides reasons or evidence, as in example (34): (33) Professor Qian Sijin: “The test results should be respected.” Neutrino Speed Challenges Relativity Theory (Guangming Daily, 29 September 2011) (34) He is the beloved student of Xu Beihong, whose paintings are never for sale and only as gifts Yun Zongxun, a 90-​year-​old special-​grade art teacher: “It is a supreme honor for me to be used by others” (Nanjing Morning News, 28 September 2011) The words that appear before the colon can also be a complete sentence used to explain the source of the information or the original context of the reported speech. Consider the following examples:

74  Reported speech in Chinese news headlines (35) The most beautiful disabled daughter-​in-​law received 10,000 yuan in aid: “I will not spend one penny on myself ” (Nanjing Morning News, 28 September 2011) (36) Watching the pregnant woman get into the car, everyone sits still An 8-​year-​old girl stands up:  Auntie, you sit here (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) (37) Line 10 train of Shanghai Metro had a rear-​end collision, which terrified passengers. “It’s so scary that the subway should crush!?” The Nanjing Metro comforted residents: We have a Siemens signaling system. (Nanjing Morning News, 28 September 2011) Although example (35) does not clearly state the source of the quotation, readers are able to infer that the sentence ‘I will not spend one penny on myself’ is spoken by the ‘most beautiful disabled daughter-​in-​law’. Examples (36) and (37), although expressed in different ways, have the same result. They both provide a more detailed context for the direct speech, being interactive and conversational in nature. The use of mixed quotation after the colon, that is, a reporting mode using a mixture of both direct and indirect speech, is rarely seen in our corpus, but example (38) is one such instance: (38) Shen Jian, Director of the Provincial Department of Education: compulsory education in Jiangsu has already entered the “free era” (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) The phrase ‘compulsory education in Jiangsu has already entered the “free era” ’ in the above example is actually a summary and conclusion of a speech on free compulsory education in Jiangsu Province given by the Director of the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Education, Shen Jian. This example mainly uses indirect speech; ‘free era’ can be regarded as being Shen’s original words, and forms a mixed quotation in conjunction with the indirect speech. It can also be seen as a scare quote with the quotation marks performing an emphatic role. 4.3.4  Free direct speech According to Leech and Short’s (1981) definition, free direct speech is a variant of direct speech, and is the form left after the quotation marks and/​ or the introductory clause are deleted from the direct speech. Such deletions, to some extent, reduce the reporter’s intervention in the reported speech and produce a more real and natural dialogic effect in the discourse. Free direct speech is relatively common in Chinese newspaper headlines, for example: (39) Since you have lost all your conscience, don’t blame the ruthless law, the prosecutor said in court

Reported speech in Chinese news headlines  75

Our sentencing proposal is: Kill! Kill! No amnesty! (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) (40) The deputy director of the Central Civilization Office claimed that the statement on “Chinese moral decline” is inappropriate If an elderly person falls, we should help them immediately. (Modern Express, 28 September 2011) Judging from the use of pronouns, the main headline in example (39) is apparently free direct speech; the prosecutor demonstrates the fairness and authority of the law in a serious tone. The subtitle ‘Since you have lost all your conscience, don’t blame the ruthless law’ is also free direct speech, providing a reason for the ‘sentencing proposal’ in the main headline. In other words, the original words of what ‘the prosecutor said in court’ are divided into two parts, which are then placed in the main headline and subtitle, respectively. The main headline and subtitle constitute the cause and effect of the judgement, making the entire news headline sound more reasonable, sonorous and powerful. In example (40), the main headline is free direct speech and the reporter concisely expresses, in a unique arrangement, the sense of urgency and coherence that should exist between ‘fall’ and ‘help’. Since FDS deletes the introductory reporting clause and/​or the quotation marks, the voice it represents in the discourse tends to be freer and more independent than DS, resulting in a dialogicality which is similar to that used in Dostoyevsky’s novels. Bakhtin describes this as ‘about someone actually present, someone who hears him (the author) and is capable of answering him… the author speaks not about a character, but with him’ (1984: 63). For example: ( 41) Seven Shenzhen Football Club players went on strike? Pure nonsense! (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) (42) After the mother had passed away, the eldest brother took out a note: Mother said that I took care of her more, so the house belongs to me (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) In example (41), the journalist is reporting, in a form of dialogue, on the rumour that ‘Seven Shenzhen Football Club players went on strike’ and the response given by the Shenzhen Football Club, giving the reader a sense of immersion in the report. Example (42) refers to a quotation within a quotation, that is, the subtitle ‘After the mother had passed away, the eldest brother took out a note’ contains the original words of the reported person. The main headline ‘Mother said that I took care of her more, so the house belongs to me’ is directly quoted by the reporter from the original words spoken by his brother. Both the main headline and subtitle appear in the form of free direct speech, giving the entire headline Bakhtin’s ‘polyphonic’ effect:  readers not only hear the voice of the reporter but also the voice of the person being

76  Reported speech in Chinese news headlines reported, as well as the voice of the ‘brother’ of the latter. The person being reported was not only talking to the reporter, but also to his ‘brother’. 4.3.5  Ambiguous direct speech Although some newspaper headlines have quotation marks and appear to be DS or FDS, when compared with the text, they are not the actual wording of the information sources, as Leech (1988) found in English, but a summary or induction of the original content. Therefore, these headlines can only be regarded as indirect speech. For example: (43) “Breaking into an office constitutes the crime of obstructing official business” (Xinhua Daily, 27 September 2011) (44) “Many investors have been fooled!” (Xinhua Daily, 27 September 2011) Example (43) is taken from a report on how the Zhaoyuan County Public Security Bureau of Heilongjiang Province owed a company more than two million yuan in project funds for three years. The company’s legal representative, Hua Liang, when going to the bureau office to ask for a response, was subjected to coercion and personal insults, which led to multiple bodily injuries. In response to reporters, the police chief said that Hua Liang and his entourage barged into the office and committed the crime of obstructing official duties. The headline is only a summary of the response given by the Director of Public Security, not his direct words. Example (44) is taken from a report on the current chaos in the TV drama market, which includes this passage: some brokers give a chest-​thumping promise to those investors that if they use a particular star, the film will be sold. In fact, in the end, the broker makes money, and the star makes money. If the TV station does not buy the film, only the investors will lose money. The headline is the reporter’s own words which he uses to summarise this passage, and these words are indirect speech.

4.4  Indirect speech Questions are often raised about the distinction between direct and indirect speech, but Waugh (1995:  165) highlights that there are indeed significant differences between these two forms of speech. If direct speech is considered to be the verbatim copy of other people’s discourse without condensing sentences, then indirect speech can be considered to be the compression, summary and extension of other people’s speech. Short (1988: 65) analyses the functions of various quotations in news discourse and finds that, in his corpus, only direct speech and free direct speech appear in news headlines.

Reported speech in Chinese news headlines  77 However, in the corpus we are investigating, indirect speech does appear in headlines, but not to the same degree as direct speech or free direct speech. The following is an English newspaper headline: (45) Early Start Is Telly Success Says Neil Doncaster (Daily Express, 3 August 2011) ‘Early Start Is Telly Success’ in example (45) can also be regarded as free direct speech, in the same way as ‘Since you have lost all your conscience, don’t blame the ruthless law’ in example (46) below: (46) Since you have lost all your conscience, don’t blame the ruthless law, the prosecutor said in court3 Our sentencing proposal is: Kill! Kill! No amnesty! (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) However, at least in terms of form and wording, it can be considered to be indirect speech, which can be proven by changing the word order of the entire headline to ‘Neil Doncaster Says That Early Start Is Telly Success’. It is the word order in examples (45) and (46) that makes the reported speech appear more like free direct speech. Of the 67 Chinese newspaper headlines in our corpus that contain reported speech, only five contain indirect speech and two contain mixed quotations, the two accounting for only 10.4 per cent of the total number. In Chinese, the introductory sentence usually appears before the reported speech, and therefore the indirect speech appearing in the headline is easier to distinguish. For example: (47) Soros claims that the eurozone should build a unified Ministry of Finance (Xinhua Daily, 26 September 2011) In example (47) ‘the eurozone should build a unified Ministry of Finance’ has neither quotation marks nor does it appear after a colon. There is no wording clue to indicate that it is direct speech, so we prefer to treat it as indirect speech. When compared with direct speech, the most important feature of indirect speech is to give the reporter greater freedom, allowing him/​her to adapt the original language in a number of different ways, from form to content, such as changing the diction of the original words, condensing the content of the original words, making a long story shorter, etc. It is important for news reporters to refine news headlines and highlight the key points of the report. The ways in which the reporter changes or compresses the original words can be investigated from at least three perspectives, that is, the extent to which reporting retains or highlights the (1) ideational meaning, (2) interpersonal meaning and (3) textual meaning of the original words.

78  Reported speech in Chinese news headlines Firstly, the reporter can retain the propositional content of the original words, that is, the ideational meaning, in the form of indirect speech. Consider the following example: (48) 60 percent of the interviewees: the official car for leaders should be cancelled (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) In example (48), the part of the sentence after the colon is the reporter’s summary of the views of ‘60 percent of the interviewees’. This type of indirect speech provides the reporter with scope to refute and comment, and also maintains a strict, clear boundary between the reporting speech and reported speech. Secondly, on the basis of retaining, to some extent, the content of the original sentence proposition, the reporter can highlight the emotions or attitudes expressed by the reported speech, that is, its interpersonal meaning. For example: (49) The heavy fog that lasted several days in Beijing was only “light pollution”? Celebrities, such as Zheng Yuanjie, questioned the air quality in Beijing. The Deputy Director of Environmental Protection: the monitored data cannot be influenced by the US embassy. (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) In example (49), the focus of the reporter is obviously not on the original words or the content of the proposition, but on the speech act of ‘questioning’ being performed by the words of ‘celebrities, such as Zheng Yuanjie’. To highlight this speech act, the reporter not only adds a question mark to the headline, but also appears to be concerned that the reader will be unable to understand the meaning of the headline. Hence, the reporter directly uses the name of the speech act, i.e. ‘question’ in the subtitle. The information sources mentioned in the subtitle, ‘celebrities, such as Zheng Yuanjie’, not only enhance the credibility of the ‘questioning’, but also express the supportive attitude of the reporter. Finally, the emphasis that indirect language places on textual or aesthetic meaning in news headlines is often reflected in the reporter’s diction, for example: (50) Kou Jianxun, Chief Strategy Analyst of Soochow Securities: The pressure above 2500 points is not small (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) In the above headline, the phrase ‘The pressure above 2500 points is not small’ is not the original words of the analyst Jianxun Kou, but it uses words that correspond with his identity as an analyst (e.g. ‘points’, ‘above’, etc.). This indirect speech incorporates some of the words and expressions of the

Reported speech in Chinese news headlines  79 original discourse, so readers can clearly see the original characteristics, subjective meaning and typicality of these words. Sometimes such words with personal, professional or industrial characteristics are put between quotation marks, and the entire headline appears to become a mixed quotation. For example: (51) Changhong Road Market Undergoes Reconstruction Merchants worry about the reconstruction going “lame”. (Modern Express, 28 September 2011) Judging from the main content of the report, the phrase ‘go lame’ in example (51) is the reporter’s words. Still, it has the spoken characteristics of the merchants and vividly summarises their concerns. These words, which incorporate indirect speech, have distinctive characteristics, embody a specific literary style and express a specific subjective meaning. Volosinov (1973) also distinguishes three trends in expressing content with indirect speech: 1) the reporter focuses primarily on the propositional content of the person being reported; 2) the reporting speech not only conveys the propositional content of the original discourse, but also conveys information about the original speaker himself, such as his speaking style, mood, attitude, etc.; and 3) it reports the internal discourses, thoughts and experiences of a character. We have previously discussed the first two of these trends. Volosinov calls the third trend ‘impressionistic modification’, which covers the ‘thought representation’ and the ‘narrative report of speech acts (NRSA)’ categories in Leech and Short’s (1981) classification of speech acts. We will discuss ‘thought representations’ in the next chapter. The following is an example of NRSA in English: ( 52) Obama Blames Republicans for Crisis (Daily Express, 26 July 2011) (53) Italy Approves Austerity Measures (Daily Express, 12 August 2011) Based on Austin’s early theory on speech acts, with the exception of ‘say’, ‘tell’ and ‘according to’, Bell (1911) calls all reporting verbs ‘news performatives’, such as ‘announce’, ‘declare’, ‘refuse’, ‘threaten’, ‘insist’, ‘denounce’, etc. These ‘news performatives’ are different from the three exception words in that it does not matter whether the content they lead to is true or false, but whether it is ‘happy’ or not, as they represent a behaviour. Fishman (1980: 99) points out that many official documents are imperative in nature, and journalists prefer these documents ‘because these are the most certain facts available’. If a person with the appropriate position says, ‘I announce’, ‘I blame’ or ‘I denounce’, then not only is what he is saying newsworthy, but also that he says so is an indisputable fact in itself. This combination of discourse and behaviour is ideal for news reports because the reporter does not need to prove any other facts, the only fact is someone said something. Reporting speech acts by themselves are very rare in the news headlines of Chinese newspapers. In our investigation, of the 1,612 Chinese headlines we

80  Reported speech in Chinese news headlines examined, 399 headlines had quotations, but hardly any of these headlines reported speech acts like examples (52) and (53). ‘Listening to the advice of experts’ in example (54) below may be considered to be one such example. ( 54) Golden Week consumption: listening to the advice of experts Three “let” teach you to avoid disputes (Guangming Daily, 28 September 2011) Reported speech like that in the following example (55) often appears in the news headlines of Chinese newspapers: ( 55) The Nanjing Metro comforted residents: We have a Siemens signaling system. (Nanjing Morning News, 28 September 2011) In this example, the reporter interprets the speech act performed by the direct speech located after the colon as comforting the residents, which performs an obvious guiding role in how readers understand ‘we have a Siemens signaling system’.

4.5  Indirect speech and thought reporting Short (1988) points out that what is reported in the news is generally only speech, unlike in novels where thoughts are reported, because reporters cannot directly enter the thoughts of the interviewees. A fictional novel is created by an author, and the author can allow the narrator access to the characters’ thoughts. Of course, this does not mean that thought reporting does not take place in the news. After all, it is possible to infer people’s thoughts and report them from their words, mannerisms and expressions. For example: (56) Was the earthquake at the boundary of Sichuan and Jiangxi an aftershock of “May 12”? Sun Shikun, a researcher at the China Earthquake Networks Centre, believes that this statement is inappropriate (Modern Express, 2 November 2011) In example (56), ‘believe’ is a typical thought reporting verb. However, thought reporting in news reports, particularly in news headlines, is much less common than in novels, because a news report pursues objectivity, while thought reporting inevitably involves the subjective intervention of the reporter. Waugh (1995: 131–​133) indicates that the function of reporting speech in news reports differs from its function in other genres, such as novels or conversations, because the focus of a news report is to convey information. Therefore, particular attention is paid to the referential meaning of words,

Reported speech in Chinese news headlines  81 the authenticity and reliability of the report and the responsibilities of the reporters involved, which are not the main concerns of novels or conversations. Even the phrase ‘this statement is inappropriate’ in example (56), as seen in the main text of the news report, is taken from words that were spoken by Sun Shikun: ‘I personally think it is inappropriate to call it an aftershock’. This inconsistency between the headline and the text can also lead to the opposite situation, that is, the transferring of a person’s thoughts to his words. Example (47) above is an example of this: the reporting verb used before the text ‘the eurozone should build a unified Ministry of Finance’ is ‘think’ in the main text instead of ‘claim’. The reporter turns Soros’s thoughts into words for a particular reason in the headline. Regardless of whether the reported speech is in Chinese or English, when a particular part of the utterance appears after the colon, it is often difficult for the reader to determine whether it is thought reporting or speech reporting. Consider the following examples: (57) General Administration of Quality Supervision:  Some areas provide protection for quality violations (Guangming Daily, 27 September 2011) (58) Prince Charles:  wind farms are horrendous (The Sunday Telegraph, 8 August 2004) In example (57), judging from the main text, the phrase after the colon is indirect speech, and the vast majority of words in this phrase are taken from the original words that were spoken, that is, ‘the “local protection” in some areas provides protection for quality violations’. Example (58) involves thought reporting. The reporting verb used in the main text is ‘believe’: ‘The Prince of Wales believes that wind farms are a “horrendous blot on the landscape” and that their spread must be halted before they ruin some of Britain’s most beautiful countryside’. However, due to the lack of reporting verbs and insufficient contextual information, the possibility cannot be excluded that, in example (57), the part after the colon is ‘considered’ by the General Administration of Quality Supervision, or that the ‘wind farms are horrendous’ in example (58) is said by ‘Prince Charles’. The corpus in this chapter demonstrates that, regardless of whether English or Chinese newspapers are being considered, indirect speech and thought reporting are very rarely seen in headlines compared to direct speech. One reason for this is that a news report pursues objectivity and fairness (even if only superficially). By using direct speech, reporters appear to promise a ‘verbatim quotation’ to gain the trust of their readers. However, by using indirect reporting or thought reporting in the headline of a news report, it is often inevitable that untrue or subjective impressions are created by the reporter. However, from a rhetorical point of view, the main reason why reporters favour direct speech and free direct speech in news headlines may be that these types of reporting modes can give people a sense of vividness and immersion in the report.

82  Reported speech in Chinese news headlines

4.6  A comparative analysis of the reporting modes used in Chinese and English news headlines In this section, we will briefly analyse the use of reported speech and its characteristics in the news headlines of the People’s Daily and The New York Times. We will focus on direct speech, indirect speech, free direct speech, free indirect speech and the narrative report of speech acts. To direct speech we will also add ‘preset direct speech’, which is essentially ‘semi-​narrative and semi-​reporting, which pre-​adjusts the reader’s perception of direct speech’ (Bakhtin, 1986: 134). Preset direct speech is expressed by first using indirect speech and then transitioning to direct speech. We have also added ‘scare quotes’ and ‘indirect speech slipped from direct speech’ to indirect speech. The latter appears to use direct speech first, and then slips into indirect speech, the opposite in form to preset direct speech. A  scare quote refers to particular words, phrases or sentence fragments in the text that have been put between quotation marks. Geis (1987: 89) calls these ‘snigger quotes’ as he believes that they produce a mocking effect. 4.6.1  Corpus and method Using the above classification model, this section discusses the characteristics and patterns of the various reporting modes in Chinese and English newspaper headlines to explore the hidden cultural, thinking and ideological differences behind their usage. The main issues to be examined are: 1) the distribution of the various reporting modes in Chinese and English newspaper reports and the ways in which they are used in headlines; and 2) the possible reasons for any differences in usage. This study uses a corpus of 200 articles each from Chinese and English newspapers. Bearing in mind the quality and authority of the reports, Chinese and English articles were selected from the People’s Daily (a total of 295,171 Chinese characters, equating to an average of 1,476 characters per article) and The New York Times (a total of 239,310 words, equating to an average of 1,197 words per article), respectively. At the same time, to increase the scientificity and comparability of the data, the corpus was collected according to the theme of the report, which was divided into six categories. The selected corpus covered the time period from July to September 2011. The corpus selection details are shown in Table 4.1. After the corpus was selected, we confirmed and coded the various reporting modes in each article according to the above categorisation. SPSS software was then used to statistically analyse the frequency of occurrence of the coded reporting modes and tables of results were produced. Due to the difference in length of the English and Chinese articles, the standard frequency of occurrence had to be calculated when comparing the reporting modes in Chinese and English. The formula used is shown below.

Reported speech in Chinese news headlines  83 Table 4.1 Chinese and English newspaper corpus categories

English

Chinese

Category

Articles

Total word count

Average word count per article

Politics Economy Law Livelihood Science Physical Education Politics Economy Law Livelihood Science Physical Education

60 40 40 40 10 10 60 40 40 40 10 10

72,625 47,926 51,587 47,246 11,390 8,536 91,368 67,195 48,224 61,371 16,050 10,963

1,210 1,198 1,290 1,181 1,139 854 1,523 1,680 1,206 1,534 1,605 1,096

Frequency of occurrence of each reporting mode per 10, 000 words = Number of occurrences of each reporting mode × 10, 000 The total word count of 200 articles 4.6.2  Results and discussion Like other forms of writing, news writing requires logic and rules, that is, the content of the report must have a specific logical relevance. News reports generally consist of three parts, namely the headline, the lead and the body. First, the distribution of the various reporting modes in different parts of each of the 200 news reports in Chinese and English newspapers is considered. As shown in Table 4.2 below, 4,784 cases of speech reporting appear in the English news reports, with 33 in the headlines, accounting for only 0.7 per cent of the total number. 99.3 per cent of the speech reporting cases occur in the lead and body of the news reports. In comparison to English, the total number of speech reporting appearing in the Chinese news reports is 2,254, only half the English value. Of these, 2,167 appear in the lead and body of the reports, accounting for 96 per cent of the total number, while 86 appear in the headlines, accounting for 4 per cent of the total number. Although a large sample of news reports was chosen as our corpus, the proportion of reported speech appearing in English and Chinese headlines is still small. However, those headlines that do use reported speech can reflect the characteristics and pragmatic functions of reported speech in newspaper headlines. Next, we specifically process the standard frequency of occurrence of the reporting modes that appear in the headlines of Chinese and English newspapers. As shown in Table 4.3, reporting modes appear in English newspaper headlines at a rate of eight per 10,000 words, while the equivalent figure

84  Reported speech in Chinese news headlines Table 4.2 The overall distribution of reporting modes in different parts of Chinese and English news reports

English 200 Chinese 200

Headline

Lead and Body

Total

33 86

4,751 2,167

4,784 2,254

0.7% 4%

99.3% 96%

Table 4.3 Statistical analysis of the reporting modes used in the headline section of Chinese and English newspapers N

Word Count

Mean

T-​value

Sig. (2-​tailed)

–​1.281

.203

English

33

41,315

8.23082

Chinese

86

128,289

9.07239

for Chinese newspapers is nine per 10,000 words. The results obtained from an independent sample T-​test, t = -​1.281, Sig. (2-​tailed) = 0.203 (> 0.05), indicate that there is no significant difference between the occurrence frequency of reporting modes in the headlines of Chinese and English newspapers. Finally, differences in the distribution and use of the various reporting modes in Chinese and English newspaper headlines and the reasons for these differences are examined. As shown in Table 4.4, indirect speech is the main reporting mode used in both types of newspaper headlines, while direct speech, preset direct speech and indirect speech slipped from direct speech do not appear. Free direct speech and the narrative report of speech acts have Sig. (2-​tailed) values > 0.05, that is, they are used with more or less the same frequency in the headlines of Chinese and English newspapers, while the other three categories, indirect speech, scare quotes and free indirect speech, have Sig. (2-​tailed) values