“Kids or demons?”: Personal referring expressions applied to juvenile offenders in English and Chinese crime news

Abstract

This study reports on a contrastive study of media representations of juvenile delinquency. Based on 87 news reports, we draw on Ariel (1991) and Xu (2000)'s accessibility hierarchy to compare the forms and functions of personal referring expressions applied to juvenile offenders in English and Chinese crime news. In addition, we extend our analysis by incorporating the discussions of the evaluative meaning of nominal descriptions under the social actor representation framework of Van Leeuwen (2008). It is found that both English and Chinese data exhibit a preference for nominal description foregrounding offenders' age in the first mentions. However, in the subsequent mentions, the key differences identified are that English news has more frequent use of definite descriptions, distal demonstratives, pronouns and functional terms, whereas Chinese news has a greater incidence of surnames, proximal demonstratives, zeros and identification terms. The discussion attempts to provide possible explanations for our findings from three aspects: linguistic features, socio-cultural conventions and social justice systems in different countries. Building upon these discussions, this study may shed empirical light on the issue of referring to juvenile offenders in mass media between two disparate languages, raising media's awareness of the mediatized language of crime.