MA Modern English Language

Speech Representation in Written News Reports

In her paper On reporting reporting: the representation of speech in facutual and fictional narratives (1994) Carmen Rosa Caldas- Coulthard analyses how speech is 留学生英语语言学论文范文represented in written news stories. She argues that reporters can use a variety of techniques or ‘strategies’ to incorporate implicit meaning into their texts. In this essay, I would like to take this framework and apply it to an article from a popular news magazine. My aim is to highlight the ways in which it is possible for reporters to manipulate the information contained in speech representations. My analysis will focus on these possibilities in order to determine to what extent one should adopt a critical attitude to speech representation in written news media.

In her paper Caldas-Coulthard’s aim is to examine speech representation in relation to the following points:

a) the means and the implications of inserting one text into another;
b) the question of veracity and truthfulness;
c) the exclusion of women as speakers from the press (P. 296)

In the first section of this essay, I will follow her lead and examine how the reporter incorporates speech representation into the article. In the second section, rather than investigate the truthfulness of the article, I will analyse its accuracy in relation to the concept of authorial averral. In the final section, I will focus on the writer’s relation to http://www.ukthesis.org/dissertation_writing/linguistic/the sources of the quotes he uses, looking first at how they are obtained and then briefly at the people he chose to quote.

The article I have chosen can be said to be representative of most news features in the way it uses a combination of direct and indirect quotes from a variety of people. It reports on how followers of Saddam Hussein identified and threatened those who gave evidence against him during his trail, focusing specifically on those men from the town of Dujail. The article originally appeared in Time magazine on October 9th 2006, and a copy of it appears in the appendix. The page references given below refer to the original article as it appeared in the magazine.

Section One: How speech is represented in ‘Saddam’s Revenge’

A reporter has two choices in the way he represents speech in a written text. He can choose to present the quote directly by naming the speaker and attributing the following quote using a speech- reporting verb, such as ‘says’. The quote is then set off by quotation marks, and this informs readers that the words contained within the quotation marks were actually spoken by the source, the original speaker. Alternatively, the reporter can represent the speech indirectly, where he still attributes the quote to a speaker using a speech-reporting verb but does not set off the content of the quote using quotation marks. This alerts the reader to the fact that the quote is being presented in the reporter’s words and is a summary or approximation of the words as they were spoken by the original source.#p#分页标题#e#

In relation to the above, Caldas-Coulthard introduces the idea, which she attributes to Fairclough, of a distinction between two types of discourse in news reporting. These are the”’primary discourse’ (the reporting) and the “secondary discourse” (the reported or represented discourse)”. (1994:296)
Using this distinction, it is clear that speech representation, whether direct or indirect, falls into the category of ‘secondary discourse’. She goes on to point out that these two discourse types can be kept separate and distinct in an article or they can be blended together. Whether a writer chooses to keep the two discourse types separate or to blend them will contribute to how the reader goes on to interpret the secondary discourse. She says, “There are therefore degrees of author interference in ‘quoting’ and ‘reporting’ and the interesting aspect to be considered is how they are used to reproduce interaction, since possible choices determine different meanings.’ (1994:297)

In this first section of my essay I want to analyse to what extent the direct and indirect speech representation in the article ‘Saddam’s Revenge” has been the subject of ‘author interference’.

The first instance of represented speech in the article occurs at the end of the second paragraph. The source is explaining what it felt like to give evidence against Saddam Hussein.

Ahmed says that when he recounted those horrors in court, he looked over at Saddam. The deposed dictator stroked his beard, looked Ahmed dead in the eye and ran his forefinger across his throat. (2006:24)

留学生论文范文At the beginning of this excerpt, the reporter signals that he is presenting the speech of a witness by giving his name, Ahmed, and supplying the speech-reporting verb ‘says’. As there are no quotation marks, we assume that what follows will be an indirect representation of what the witness actually said. While we read the first sentence, we feel confident that we are reading a third person account of what Ahmed told the reporter. The structure of each clause helps to create this effect. Each third-person clause within the first sentence could easily be converted into the first person – ‘When I recounted those horrors in court, I looked over at Saddam’ – we get the impression that what we are reading is close to what the witness actually said. The second sentence contains one more clause that could possibly be spoken by Ahmed – ‘The deposed dictator stroked his beard…’ – but even at this point, we must consider whether the use of noun phrase ‘The deposed dictator…’ would be one that the speaker would naturally choose. It feels more like the word choice of the reporter. In the second clause of the second sentence the phrase ‘looked Ahmed dead in the eye…’ occurs. The author uses the witness’s name rather than the third-person pronoun ‘him’. The effect of this is to alert us to the writer’s presence in the speech representation. He is not merely reporting what the witness told him, he is interpreting it for the readers.#p#分页标题#e#

The above example provides a good illustration of how a writer can blend the two discourse types, the reported and the reporting, together to create a particular effect.

This is not the only way that speech representation is open to author interference and manipulation. Caldas- Coulthard points out that reporters employ a form of ‘structural simplification’ in representing speech. What they represent is ‘…always the reduction of an initial communicative event…’ (1994:297). What she means by this is that by necessity reporters cannot include everything that occurred during a particular interview. She notes that the three move exchange structure of initiation, response and follow-up pointed out by Sinclair and Coulthard disappears and what we are left with is ‘…just one move, generally an informing one…’(ibid). The implication of this reduction is that the reporter only needs to include those parts of his initial interview that are ‘significant utterances’. By ‘significant utterances’, she means those sections of an interview or exchange that represent the author’s point-of-view.

I want to use the following excerpt from the Time article to analyse the possibilities open to the writer for the manipulation of information presented by structural simplification. Here the mayor of the town of Dujail, where many of the witnesses against Saddam came from, is discussing the problems that have befallen the town since Saddam’s trial started.

Insurgents have destroyed the town’s water and electricity facilities. Mayor al-Zubeidy says he needs at least 200 more people from the police or Iraqi National Guard to secure the entrances and exits of Dujail. He says he has been unable to persuade the Iraqi government to send reinforcements to the town. “We haven’t gotten any support from any of the governments,” he says. “There is almost a siege of Dujail, and we can’t move out. If they catch you on the way to Baghdad and they find out you are from Dujail, you will be killed at once.” (2006:25)

The first indirect quote in the above text - Mayor al-Zubeidy says he needs at least 200 more people from the police or Iraqi National Guard to secure the entrances and exits of Dujail- is an example of structural simplification in that we have only one move in the exchange, and it is an informing move. The question that prompted this response is missing, but if asked to supply the missing question, most readers would probably respond along the following lines: How many police and soldiers would you need to secure Dujail? This question is, however, only one of several possible questions that could elicit the same answer. For example, the journalist could have asked, Do 留学生论文you think 200 soldiers will be enough to secure Dujail.? To which the mayor responded yes, even though the actual number needed might be much lower. Our inability to read a full exchange in news stories leaves open this means of moulding the information contained in quotes. I have no evidence that the journalist resorted to this type of manipulation. I only wish to draw attention to the possibilities that exist for doing so because of the concept of structural simplification.#p#分页标题#e#

A further possibility of manipulation exists because of our assumption that an exchange structure is in place. Reading the above excerpt we believe without any firm textual clue other than the fact that one sentence follows another that the indirect and direct quotes occurred within the same conversational framework. However, it is possible that the information contained in the indirect quotes – Mayor al-Zubeidy says he needs at least 200 more people from the police or Iraqi National Guard to secure entrances and exits from Dujail. He says he has been unable to persuade the Iraqi government to send reinforcements to the town. – could have come from a completely different source than directly from the mayor. It is possible that they came from press releases or other news stories or indirectly through a third party. But when they are combined with the direct quotes we assume that they are all part of the same ongoing interview.

Section Two: Authorial Averral and Accuracy

Caldas-Courthald introduces the concept of authorial averral into her framework. In terms borrowed from Sinclair, she defines averral as the ‘…verbal assertion of any fact…’(2006: 299). For reporters to provide an accurate account there needs to be a correspondence between their averral, or claim that something is true, and the facts. This is unlike fiction writers who can disregard the correspondence between fact and averral. According to Caldas-Courthald this provides another opportunity or strategy for the reporter to manipulate speech representation. (ibid)

She gives the following example:

‘Mary remarked Peter complained that he was being misinterpreted. At least that’s what she said he said.’ The last part of the utterance makes it clear that the speaker (in the above quote) is saying: “Don’t take me as averring the truth of what was said, but only averring that Mary said what I say she said about Peter. (1994:300)

She argues that this gives the writer or speaker the ability to distance himself from what has been stated, and this distance allows him to influence how the material will be interpreted. But rather than investigate how writer’s smuggle implicit meaning into texts in this way, I would like to focus on the implications for accuracy that arise from a writer’s averral.

In the factual representation of speech, readers must rely on the writer’s averral of some other person’s averral of a proposition, so the distance between the reader and the initial proposition can sometimes be significant, so much so that a reader could be justified in questioning whether accuracy has been sustained over such a gap.

The following example from the article ‘Saddam’s Revenge’ shows how great the distance between what was written by the reporter and the source of the quote, the actual words spoken, might become.

Ahmed believes that Saddam’s throat slitting gesture, made while television cameras were rolling, was a message to loyalists to kill Ahmed’s family. (p.24)#p#分页标题#e#

Here we have another indirect quote prefaced with the speaker’s name and the speech-reporting verb ‘believes’. What is the reporter averring by including this quote in his article? First of all, he is not averring that ‘…Saddam’s throat slitting gesture, made while television cameras were rolling, was a message to loyalists to kill Ahmed’s family’. Nor is he averring Ahmed’s believe. All that the writer is averring is that ‘Ahmed told him that he believes….’ It is, however, possible that the writer cannot even aver this much. The source of the above quote is an Iraqi, Ahmed. If Ahmed speaks no English and the reporter speaks no Arabic, then the interview would have to have been carried out with the help of an interpreter. A consequence of this is that the most that the reporter could aver in this situation would be that ‘The interpreter says that Ahmed believes that….’ Each averral is filtered through someone else’s interpretation, moving it one step farther away from the original proposition. As a consequence, readers would be justified in questioning the accuracy of the quote.

The concept of authorial averral, therefore, not only allows the reporter to distance himself from a particular quote, it also allows him to assert propositions whose accuracy is questionable.

Section Three: The Sources of Speech Representation

Where do the sources of quotes in news stories come from? A basic assumption is that the reporter obtains these directly from those involved. But this is not always the case. As Caldas-Coulthard points out,

News agencies and other media supply “stories” to reporters. The initial sources can be primary, in other words, an immediate participant who describes facts in loco … or secondary, somebody who retells the report of a primary participant. However, in both cases, much of what is finally reported is filtered through the news process , in other words, through the re-interpratation and evaluation of many people – reporters, copy-writers, sub-editors and editors. (p.303).

She does not, however, provide any textual examples of the primary/secondary news source distinction. I think that part of the reason for this is that it is very difficult to determine the source of a writer’s quotes just by reading his text, as most reporter’s strive to give the impression of immediacy and ‘first hand evidence’ in everything they write. In the following section, I would like to see to what extent it is possible to analyse how the writer came by the sources of his quotes for ‘Saddam’s Revenge’.

Most of the quotes, both direct and indirect, are attributed to speakers without any indication as to how the sources were obtained. This helps to create the impression that what we are reading is an edited version of a face-to-face conversation. As in the following example:

‘The town had provided Ali with three bodyguards, but he still feels vulnerable. “I am hunted,” he says. “The government is ignoring Dujail.” ‘(2006:25)#p#分页标题#e#

However, a little later in the article, we are given the following quote:

‘ “Of course, now it is much better,” says Ali, speaking by phone from Dujail.’ (2006:25)

The phrase ‘…speaking by phone..’ tells us how the quotes were obtained. A similar indication tells us how the following quote was obtained.

‘When I told the U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad about the killing of witnesses’ families in Dujail, he shook his head but said the current loss of life is “different than a government carrying on violence against its own citizens.” ‘ (2006:25)

In this example the writer includes the clause ‘…he shook his head…’ which implies that the Ambassador and the reporter had a face-to-face talk. As Time is a well-established mainstream news magazine, it is not difficult to imagine the American Ambassador in Iraq granting one of Time’s reporters an interview. But in the following quote a face-to-face interview seems less likely to have taken place.

A number of insurgent cells operating around Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, a 45- minute drive north from Dujail have targeted relatives of witnesses, most of whom rarely leave the green zone. Abu Hamid, commander of a nationalist cell based north of Dujail says if any of the witnesses in the Saddam trial leave the green zone to return home, “we will destroy all of Dujail. If the people of Dujail allow these villains to live in their town, they will get the same treatment. ‘ (2006:25)

The writer gives no indication here on how he obtained the quote, but considering that the source is the leader of an anti-western insurgent cell, we can question whether or not the reporter received the quote directly form the source. But the impression we get as readers is that the reporter talked directly to the insurgent leader, and this impression adds an authority to the piece that would be missing if we knew the quote came from an intermediate source.

A further point in relation to sources concerns who reporters choose to quote. In the final section of her paper, Caldas-Coulthard focuses on the issue of ‘accessed voices and gender bias’. She provides evidence to back-up her claim that women are under represented in news media. This claim would seem to be borne out in ‘Saddam’s Revenge’ where none of the quotes are from women. However, this is a less surprising observation than it might be if the article were reporting on an issue in a western liberal democracy, where women are supposedly on an equal footing with men.

The interesting observation in this article comes from recognising who is chosen as a source. Of the ten instances of speech representation, the only quotes that are not from people in authority come from Ahmed and his brother, both of whom are involved directly with the threat from Saddam. The remaining quotes come from the following people: the town’s mayor, an adviser to the prime minister, chief of Dujail city council, the commander of a nationalist cell and the US Ambassador. The interesting point is that most of the quotes taken from these people give no specialist insight connected with their official position, and in many cases the information contained in the quotes attributed to them could have been given by people in non- official positions. This suggest that those included in the article were included because of their position of authority rather than what they had to say. This would seem to strengthen Calda-Coulthards contention that ‘the choice of who is given voice depends on the importance given to some people instead of others.’ (1994:304)#p#分页标题#e#

Conclusion

I have taken the terms and framework set out by Caldas-Coulthard and applied them to the speech representation of one article. The aim of the analysis was to determine the possibilities open to reporters when they come to represent the speech of others in their own reporting. I found that if a writer chooses to take advantage of these possibilities, he is able to control how readers interpret the facts. It is therefore necessary to take a critical approach to the reading and interpretation of speech representation in news stories.

REFRENCES

Caldas-Coulthard, C.R. (1994) On reporting reporting: the representation of speech in factual and factional narratives. In Coulthard, M. Advances in Written Text Analysi.s Routledge, 295-308.
Bennet, B. (2006) Saddam’s Revenge. In Time October 9 2006 Vol.168, No 16, 24-25

Appendix
Saddam's Revenge
By Brian Bennett
Baghdad
When Ahmed Hassan Mohammed al-Dujaili took the stand as witness No. 1 in the trial of Saddam Hussein last December, he might have thought his worst nightmares were behind him. On a summer afternoon in 1982, two days after gunmen in his town opened fire on a presidential motorcade, Ahmed and all the other males in his family were rounded up by Saddam's Special Republican Guard. Ahmed and three of his 11 brothers were eventually released; the rest disappeared. Two years later, Saddam signed execution orders for six of Ahmed's brothers; a seventh died during interrogation. They were among the 148 men and boys Saddam is accused of ordering killed in retaliation for the assassination attempt. Ahmed says that when he recounted those horrors in court, he looked over at Saddam. The deposed dictator stroked his beard, looked Ahmed dead in the eye and ran his forefinger across his throat.
Since then, the nightmare has returned to Dujail. Ahmed believes that Saddam's throat-slitting gesture, made while television cameras were rolling, was a message to loyalists to kill Ahmed's family. Two of his cousins were kidnapped in July and haven't been heard from since. On Aug. 6, his brother Ali Hassan Mohammed al-Dujaili, another witness, was attacked in the middle of Dujail. Ahmed's nephew Husam was killed while protecting Ali. When Ahmed's younger brother Jaafer came to collect Husam's body, a sniper lying in wait put several bullets in Jaafer's legs. Jaafer lived but will always walk with a severe limp. He is among the lucky ones. The town's mayor, Haji Mohammed Hassan al-Zubeidy, says some 180 people have been murdered in Dujail since Saddam's trial began in October 2005. Basam Ridha, adviser to the Prime Minister for the Saddam trial, puts the number closer to 200. About 80 more have vanished while traveling on the road between Dujail and Baghdad. "Have you ever heard of the Bermuda Triangle?" asks Mahmoud Hussein al-Hesreji, chief of the Dujail city council. "It's just like that."#p#分页标题#e#
On Oct. 16, a five-judge panel will deliver a verdict on whether Saddam and his regime carried out the original 148 killings in Dujail. If convicted, he will face the death penalty. That trial, as well as a second one focused on the massacre of Iraqi Kurds in 1988, has been taking place inside the heavily secured Green Zone, where a succession of judges have given the former dictator the kind of hearing he never afforded his victims. But for many others associated with the trials, there has been no refuge from assassins who take justice--and revenge--into their own hands. Shi'ite death squads have murdered defense lawyers, while ex-Baathists have targeted the families of prosecutors and judges. The brother-in-law of Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa, the second trial's presiding judge, was gunned down last week in Baghdad. If putting Saddam on trial is intended to help Iraqis bury the demons of his murderous rule, the spate of vendetta killings has served as a reminder of the unchecked mayhem that has followed it.
Nowhere has the trial brought more misery than in Dujail, a town of 84,000, most of them Shi'ites, in the middle of the Sunni triangle. Since the start of Saddam's trial, Dujail has been infiltrated by ex-Baathist hit squads. Residents believe they have been ordered by Saddam's former henchmen to take out the families of witnesses. A number of insurgent cells operating around Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, a mere 45-minute drive north of Dujail, have targeted relatives of witnesses, most of whom rarely leave the Green Zone. Abu Hamid, commander of a nationalist cell based north of Dujail, says if any of the witnesses in the Saddam trial leave the Green Zone to return home, "we will destroy all of Dujail. If the people of Dujail allow these villains to live in the town, they will get the same treatment."
The plight of the town reflects the broader collapse of order in the center of Iraq. Insurgents have destroyed the town's water and electricity facilities. Mayor al-Zubeidy says 留学生论文he needs at least 200 more people from the police or Iraqi National Guard to secure the entrances and exits of Dujail. He says he has been unable to persuade the Iraqi government to send reinforcements to the town. "We haven't gotten any support from any of the governments," he says. "There is almost a siege of Dujail, and we can't move out. If they catch you on the way to Baghdad and they find out you are from Dujail, you will be killed at once." The town has provided Ali with three police bodyguards, but he still feels vulnerable. "I'm hunted," he says. "The government is ignoring Dujail."
The killings in Dujail speak to a larger battle being waged in the Iraqi psyche. In Saddam's police state, there were navigable boundaries that made it possible to live. True, the executions by Saddam's regime in Dujail showed that those boundaries were a mirage: they could close in on you in less time than it takes a bullet to fly from the barrel of a gun. But life in Iraq has become so bloody and death so ever present, random and unpredictable that some Iraqis are nostalgic for Saddam's tyranny. When I told U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad about the killings of witnesses' families in Dujail, he shook his head but said the current loss of life is "different than a government carrying on violence against its own citizens." Iraqis, he says, "have paid and are paying a high price to potentially head in a great direction that was not available under Saddam."#p#分页标题#e#
It is indicative of the scale of Saddam's brutality that there are some in Dujail who believe the current bloodshed is preferable to what preceded it. "Of course, now it is much better," says Ali, speaking by phone from Dujail. "Saddam's terrorism would go on forever if he were still in power." Ali's brother Ahmed, witness No. 1 in the Saddam trial, doesn't know when he will leave the Green Zone or what awaits him if he does. But after spending his high school years in prison and losing most of his brothers, he says he is willing to pay the ultimate price to see Saddam answer for his crimes: "I'll give up my own life and the lives of my family if it means I have helped send Saddam to the gallows." The sobering reality is that both may come true.
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