This article presents a generalized model of reference relations in the discourse of television news based on Montgomery’s principles of intelligibility, Halliday and Hasan’s reference cohesion, Martin’s identification system, Tseng’s cohesive reference and some intersemiotic models. Reference in television news involves reference patterns from the verbal track (verbal reference), the visual track (visual reference) and across the two tracks (visual–verbal reference). Based on the categorization of verbal reference, this study classifies visual reference as personals (such as visual reappearance), demonstratives (such as proximity and direction) and comparatives (such as similarity and difference). Reference across visual and verbal tracks includes three general types of visual–verbal reference, i.e. complementary, visual-as-bridge and parallel, among others. Through these patterns of reference and their reference chains, participants in television news can be tracked and identified. This model is applied to a comparative analysis of two news items broadcast separately by BBC’s News at Ten and CCTV’s News Simulcast. Differences and their implications are presented and discussed.
BellA. (1991) The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.
5.
EdgintonBMontgomeryM. (1996) The Media. Manchester: The British Council.
6.
EkströmM. (2002) Epistemologies of TV journalism: A theoretical framework. Journalism3(3): 259–282.
7.
FengD. (2013) National voice: A discourse analysis of China Central Television’sNews Simulcast. Discourse & Communication7(3): 255–273.
8.
GaltungJRugeM.H. (1965) The structure of foreign news: The presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in four Norwegian newspapers. Journal of Peace Research2(1): 64–90.
9.
HallidayM.A.KHasanR. (1976) Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
10.
HasanR. (1984) Coherence and cohesive harmony. In: FloodJ. (ed.) Understanding Reading Comprehension: Cognition, Language, and the Structure of Prose. Newark: International Reading Association, 181–219.
11.
JanneyR.W. (2010) Film discourse cohesion. In: HoffmannC.R. (ed.) Narrative Revisited: Telling a Story in the Age of New Media. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 245–266.
12.
KongK. (2006) A taxonomy of the discourse relations between words and visual. Information Design Journal14(3): 207–230.
13.
KressGVan LeeuwenT. (2006[1996]) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd edn.London: Routledge.
14.
LiuYO’HalloranK.L. (2009) Intersemiotic texture: Analyzing cohesive devices between language and images. Social Semiotics19(4): 367–388.
15.
MarshE.EWhiteM.D. (2003) A taxonomy of relationships between images and texts. Journal of Documentation59(6): 647–672.
16.
MartinJ.R. (2004[1992]) English Text: System and Structure. Beijing: Peking University Press.
17.
MartinecR. (1998) Cohesion in action. Semiotica120(1/2): 161–180.
18.
MartinecR. (2013) Nascent and mature uses of a semiotic system: The case of image–text relations. Visual Communication12(2): 147–172.
19.
MartinecRSalwayA. (2005) A system for image–text relations in new (and old) media. Visual Communication4(3): 337–371.
PalmerR.B. (1989) Bakhtinian translinguistics and film criticism: the dialogical image? In: PalmerR.B. (ed.) The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches. New York: AMS Press, 303–341.
27.
RoyceT. (1998) Synergy on the page: Exploring intersemiotic complementarity in page-based multimodal text. JASFL Occasional Papers1(1): 25–50.
28.
RoyceT. (2007) Intersemiotic complementarity: A framework for multimodal discourse analysis. In: RoyceTBowcherW. (eds) News Directions in the Analysis of Multimodal Discourse. New York: Routledge, 63–109.
29.
ScannellP. (2001) Authenticity and experience. Discourse Studies3(4): 405–411.
30.
TannenD. (2007) Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
31.
TsengC. (2008) Coherence and cohesive harmony in filmic text. In: UnsworthL. (ed.), Multimodal Semiotics: Functional Analysis in Contexts of Education. London: Continuum, 89–104.
32.
TsengC. (2012) Audiovisual texture in scene transition. Semiotica192: 123–160.
33.
TsengC. (2013) Cohesion in Film: Tracking Film Elements. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
34.
TsengC.BatemanJ.A. (2010) Chain and choice in filmic narrative: An analysis of multimodal narrative construction in The Fountain. In: HoffmannC.R. (ed.) Narrative Revisited: Telling a Story in the Age of New Media. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 213–144.
35.
TsengC.BatemanJ.A. (2012) Multimodal narrative construction in Christopher Nolan’s Memento: A description of analytic method. Visual Communication11(1): 91–119.
36.
Van DijkT.A. (1988) News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
37.
Van LeeuwenT. (1991) Conjunctive structure in documentary film and television. Continuum5(1): 76–114.
38.
Van LeeuwenT. (2005) Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge.
39.
Van LeeuwenT. (2006) Towards a semiotics of typography. Information Design Journal14(2): 139–155.
40.
ZelizerB. (1990) Achieving journalistic authority through narrative. Critical Studies in Mass Communication7: 366–376.
41.
ZhouXXuF. (2002) Xin-Wen Lian-Bo yang-ben fen-xi yu yan-jiu (A sample analysis of News Simulcast). Xian-dai Chuan-bo (Modern Communication) 3: 23–27.
