Reported Speech in Opinion Newspaper Articles and Political Speeches: An English/Spanish Contrastive Approach

This paper sets forth an analysis of reporting verbs in a self-compiled 400,000-word corpus evenly divided into discourse domains (opinion newspaper articles and political speeches), languages (English and Spanish) and ideologies (conservative and progressive). The reporting verbs are subdivided into three categories according to the implicated level of commitment towards the communicated information: neutral, qualified positive, and qualified negative. The results uncover the higher frequency of reporting verbs in English, newspaper discourse and progressive discourse, compared to Spanish, political discourse and conservative discourse, with some exceptions to this overall pattern. The paper also confers more specific findings, such as the coincidence in the most frequently used markers across languages and genres except for the Spanish conservative political discourse or the association of concrete reporting verbs with specific genres or ideologies. The distribution of reporting verbs across languages, domains and ideologies is also shown to have similarities and differences with the distribution of markers of the related category of epistemic stance in the same corpus.