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.