This article aims to discover the principle that underlies correlations between choices of evidential qualification and the communicative purposes of Chinese newspaper reportage along the dimension of subjectivity/objectivity. Distributional comparisons of data from the China Times news website reveal a pragmatic distinction between evidential subclasses. Reportatives predominate in politics and business news, where objectivity carries higher weight, while in less objectivity-oriented reports as local news, sensories are of greater frequency. The latter is also prevalent as journalists reflect on a reported (...) event. The level of evidential subjectivity thus varies significantly with the nature of evidence. An evaluation drawn from shared belief tends to be experienced as less subjective than one built upon what is accessible to the journalist alone. This suggests the use of evidentiality as reflective of the stance of the newspaper media. (shrink)

This article explores intertextual aspects of Chinese newspaper commentaries on the events of 11 September 2001. Newspaper commentaries in China are often a hybrid genre that combines the characteristics of comprehensive news reports and opinion articles. Informed by genre theories and discussions of intertextuality in different disciplines, this article examines the micro-genres of the data collected and investigates how the Chinese writers include and use outside sources and how they position themselves as writers in relation to other sources. The analysis (...) reveals that Chinese writers tend to use the explanatory micro-genre often with attributed but unidentified external sources or sources with high status for keeping a distance from these sources in the writing. This suggests that the writers tend to avoid personal authorship and responsibility for what they write. The article also discusses the textual and intertextual features in relation to the roles of the press in the Chinese context. (shrink)