Inexplicit reported speakers in hard news : text, discourse and genre perspective

Abstract

This paper investigates forms of presentation with inexplicit, i.e. covert or formally unexpressed, reported speakers in hard news discourse in British broadsheets. The research develops the discussion presented, for instance, in Ljung (1998), Marín-Arrese (2002a), Semino and Short (2004), Martínez-Caro (2006) and Stenvall (2008a, 2014) in three perspectives. The textual perspective concerns (potential) co-reference between an inexplicit reported speaker and external voices present explicitly in the text. The discourse perspective compares agent obfuscation in two different contexts – the context of epistemic assessment and the context of negative evaluation (Bednarek 2006a; Bednarek and Caple 2012). The research shows that the functional distinction between epistemic and negative evaluation manifests itself in the differences in lexico-grammatical choices, the type of forms of presentation, the linguistic cues that signal the presence of voice and the potentiality of blending of the internal and external voice. The genre perspective discusses the influence of generic conventions on the distribution of inexplicit voices across the generic structure of hard news (van Dijk 1988; Feez et al. 2008; Urbanová 2013a).