Chapter 12. Rumour in the present Romanian press: Aspects of knowledge sources and their linguistic markers

The focus of this chapter is public rumour as echoed in current Romanian press. We will mainly refer to journalistic discourse, in a monologic form. The illustrative texts are drawn from Internet sources. The theoretical framework of the discussion is represented by the discourse polyphony approaches of the Bakhtin – Ducrot – Nølke type. In the linguistic analysis I intend to highlight several aspects of the semantic field of rumour (well-represented in current Romanian language), the variety of introductive formulae for rumour in current journalistic language, the linguistic markers (evidentials) that journalists use in order to indicate their reserve or distance from a message or from a piece of information received from somebody else. If Romania could export its rumours, it would be wealthier than Germany. (Ken Jowitt, Dilema, 1995, 116: 9)