Kareen Gervasi, California State University San Bernardino
'Spanish Reported Speech in Journalistic Discourse'
Pragmatic motivations in the use of reported speech in newspaper articles have been analyzed in earlier research (Waugh 1995, Redeker 1996, Mendez García de Paredes 1999, 2000, Bolívar and Betarcourt 2002). These studies find that the use of reported speech in journalistic discourse is influenced by the reporter’s communicative need to manipulate and interpret the information according to his/her own communicative goals.
In this paper I analyze the variable use of direct (DD) and indirect discourse (ID) in two Spanish language newspapers with different ideological perspectives as well as different functions: Granma (the official newspaper of the ruling Cuban Communist Party) and El Nuevo Herald (a Miami-based newspaper that caters to the Cuban exile community). DD and ID are illustrated in (1) and (2) respectively:
(1) ‘”Mi padre poseía miles de hectáreas de tierra”, aseguró Castro’. (El Nuevo Herald 05/21/2006) ‘”My father owned thousands of hectares of land”, Castro claimed’.
(2) ‘Rodríguez indicó que Estados Unidos incumple abiertamente con los principios de la Carta de la ONU, ...’ (Granma 09/27/05) ‘Rodríguez indicated that the United States openly violates the principles of the United Nations charter, ...’
The use of DD (as in (1)) in news reports is a strategy by which the reporter conveys objectivity by preserving the authenticity of the reported speech. Thus, he/she protects his/her responsibility for the contents of what is being reported, whereas the reporter’s use of ID, paraphrasing the original speech (as in (2)), tends to reflect his/her own interpretation and subjectivity (see García de Paredes 1999) and to endorse the views of the person whose speech is reported.
I claim that the patterns of use of DD and ID in journalistic discourse are influenced by the ideological interests that the news reporter is serving and that the level of political and social-economic power of those whose voice is being reported influences the reporter’s use of DD and ID.
The statistical results reveal a significant correlation between news reports from Granma that quote government officials and the use of ID, whereas in El Nuevo Herald, there is almost equal use of DD and ID. The higher tendency of use of ID in Granma correlates with the reporter’s ideology, which endorses (at least officially) the views of the government official being quoted. Conversely, El Nuevo Herald’s reporters tend to use both DD and ID equally when reporting the voice of powerful actors in the news, which signals a higher degree of freedom as to whether the reporter wishes to endorse the voices he/she reports in the news. In contrast, when ordinary citizens without power or influence are quoted in both publications, DD is preferred.
Bibliography
Betancourt, G., Bolívar A. (2002). Estructuras de reporte y atribución de la información en la noticia periodística. Núcleo 1 (19), 41-56.
Bolívar, A. (1996). El control del acceso a la palabra en la noticia periodística. Estudios en el Análisis crítico del discurso 14, 11-45.
El Nuevo Herald (selected news articles from May 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, , 20, 21 2006)
Granma (selected news articles from April 2005, September 2005, October 2005, November 2005, December 2005, January 2006 and May 2006)
Méndez García de Paredes, E. (1999). Análisis de la reproducción del discurso ajeno en los textos periodísticos, Pragmalingüística, 7, 99-128.
Méndez García de Paredes, E. (2000). La literalidad de la cita en los textos periodísticos. Revista Española de Lingüística, 30, 1, 147-168.
Redeker, G. (1996). Free indirect discourse in newspaper reports. Linguistics in the Netherlands, 221-232.
Vincent, D., Perrin, L. ‘On the narrative vs non-narrative functions of reported speech: A socio-pragmatic study’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3/3: 291-313.
Waugh, L., Reported speech in journalisitic discourse; The relation of function and text. Text (1), 129-173.
