In the name of a vessel: emotive perspectives in the reporting of the Ehime MaruGreeneville collision in a Japanese newspaper

Abstract

This paper analyzes referential forms that identify the Ehime Maru and the Greeneville, the two vessels involved in the February 9, 2001, collision off the coast of Hawaii. Analysis of 256 articles reporting the collision obtained from the Mainichi Shinbun newspaper internet site results in referential preferences for Ehime maru 'the Ehime Maru' and gensen 'nuclear submarine'. I argue that different levels of elaboration and specificity observed in these choices are motivated, in part, by the reporter's emotive perspective, based on proximal insider versus distal outsider positioning. Previous studies (including syntactic, discourse, and pragmatic accounts) on referential strategies, including the research area of anaphora, fail to fully explain the phenomenon under investigation. Through interpretive and quantitative approaches, I emphasize that a satisfactory account of referential forms cannot be reached unless one understands how the writer's emotivity plays a part in choosing referential forms.

Communicating affect in news stories: The case of the lead sentence

“…5 This echoes the distinction that has been made between a proximal ('insider') perspective and a distal ('outsider') perspective (Maynard 2002a). As writers and readers share the same sociocultural context, a certain degree of relationship-distance or closeness-may exist between both parties.…”

“…Dunn also showed how a speaker of Japanese deploys a complex array of grammatical emotion-markers to build audience rapport. Maynard (2002a) examined the reports/articles of a Japanese newspaper about a collision between a Japanese and an American vessel in 2001. She considered the phenomenon of referential choice-namely, the way the two vessels were identified-from the perspectives of where the reporter psychologically and emotionally positions him-or herself, that is to say, the di¤erent 'emotive perspectives', depending on how the writer feels about the two vessels.…”

Reanalysis of contrastive -wa in Japanese

“…According to Ungerer (1997), who examines popular and quality papers in both English and German, emotional expressions operate regardless of types of papers or languages but the writer's strategies to achieve them distinguish these two types of newspapers. More recently, Maynard (2002) has investigated Japanese news items about the collision of two vessels, and the ways in which the writer alternates referential expressions for vessels (e.g. Ehime maru) with different lexical items (e.g.…”