Speech Presentation in the British and German Press

This book is a comparative linguistic study analysing the phenomenon of speech presentation or Redewiedergabe in a corpus of British and German newspaper articles. By applying a modified speech presentation model to a corpus of 143 articles originally, the prototype had been designed for the analysis of English literary texts the author shows that it is possible to examine journalistic texts stylistically and to compare texts written in different languages. The analysis, divided into a qualitative and a quantitative part, reveals that the genre of a text or paper influences the use of speech presentation to a high extent. Differences between the German and English texts in terms of language structure and also newspaper culture are highlighted, involving an examination of the use of reporting verbs, the subjunctive and berichtete Rede in the German articles.

Auteur

The Author: Melanie Brüngel-Dittrich, born 1973 in Wuppertal, studied English and Latin and graduated from the University of Bochum in 2000. During her Ph.D.-studies she worked there as a mentor at the English department as well as for the international project for graduates Promotionskolleg Ost-West. Since summer 2005 she has been employed at the University of Bochum as a project manager for EU-projects and also works as a lecturer of English.

Contenu

Contents: Speech presentation - models for the English and the German language - Newspapers on the Internet - Qualitative and quantitative analysis of speech presentation in British and German newspaper articles - Reporting verbs in British and German newspaper articles - Comparison of results with existing studies and theories - The use of the subjunctive in German news texts - Berichtete Rede - Speech presentation in headlines.