Historical Trends in the Pragmatics of Indirect Reports in Dutch Crime News Stories

Recent research has shown that the use of indirect reports in Dutch crime news stories has decreased significantly over the past 150 years. In this study we explore possible explanations for this decrease by assessing variations in the degree of intertwinement between the voices of journalist and news source in a corpus of 528 indirect reports. Results indicate that in indirect reports from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the journalist’s voice was typically either dominant over or strongly intertwined with the news source’s voice. In later periods, the voices of journalist and news source seem to have become disentangled. The decrease in indirect reports in Dutch news stories might thus be explained by an increased avoidance of the subjective intertwining of voices and, correspondingly, an increased separation of responsibilities between journalist and news sources. In this sense, the pragmatics of indirect reports became similar to the pragmatics of direct reports, causing the grammatically embedding indirect mode to lose its distinctive function.