Reported speech as persuasion: A discourse analysis of Japanese Journalism

Reported speech can be defined as a form of communication by which speakers bring external voices into their own utterances. Recent studies have also found that reported speech has a persuasive function in presenting an external voice as either factual or contentious in order to support a speaker’s own arguments and refute alternative points of view. Such persuasion can be achieved by, for example, deploying factual/non-factual reporting verbs, or evaluating external sources or propositions. While the persuasive function of reported speech has been extensively studied for English, such studies are not widely available for Japanese. The present article investigates the grammatical forms of reported speech, including reporting verbs and evaluative language, to reveal how reported speech realises persuasive functions in Japanese. Seventy-four online news editorials are analysed to show that, regardless of which reporting verbs or grammatical forms are deployed, in Japanese the reported proposition cannot be construed as factual or contentious without including a negative or positive evaluation of the external voice. This result, different from what has been proposed for English, also cautions against the automatic use of an English-influenced framework for the discourse analysis of multiple languages.