Diachronic changes in forms and functions of reported discourse in news narratives

This study examines historical developments in the forms and functions of reported discourse in news narratives. In this genre, reported discourse can serve at least two main pragmatic functions: (1) a dramatizing function by reconstructing what news sources were saying or thinking during the newsworthy events (narrative-internal discourse) or (2) an additional legitimizing function by revealing that the narrative reconstruction is based on statements made by these sources after the events took place (narrative-external discourse). We applied a cognitive linguistic model to a corpus of 300 Dutch news narratives published between 1860 and 2009. Results showed an increase in direct reported discourse at the expense of indirect reported discourse. Furthermore, a steep increase in the percentage of narratives with narrative-external discourse was found, whereas the percentage of narratives with narrative-internal discourse remained stable over time. Moreover, the results revealed a striking shift in the functional use of reported discourse: until halfway of the twentieth century, reported discourse was predominantly used as a strategy to dramatize news narratives by reconstructing news sources' speech and thought, but then it developed an additional legitimizing function by anchoring the information exchange between journalist and news source in a Narrative-External Space.