Are writers committed to what they report? A taxonomy of reportive verbal expressions in the British and Spanish press

Abstract

The degree of writer’s commitment or the way in which the stance towards the truth-value of the reported information is suggested in reporting verbs, has been the centre of analysis in various linguistic studies (Thompson 1996; Chen 2007). This paper examines this parameter by means of a corpus-based survey, starting from the understanding of commitment as a graded phenomenon, as well as the value readers’ intuition has to judge when evaluating the signals embedded in reporting verbs. The results uncover the subtle interplay of voices in the quality press, without adversely affecting the supposed intertextual impartiality of the text.