Abstract
No discourse is really new: everything we say or write integrates words or expressions that have already been used by others and have circulated among speakers. The ubiquity of quoting is one of the key points of The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, which presents 16 original contributions to pragmatics through the lens of quoting as ‘an act of taking up text and, in doing so performing a shift of context, focus and perspective’ (p. 2). Each chapter relies implicitly or explicitly on the introductory distinction between the act of quoting, its products (quotations or quotes) and its indicators (quotatives). The identification of the quoters – the speakers who produce quotations or quotes – also constitutes an important dimension.
Whereas most contributions are devoted to quotations or quotes as traces of so-called reported speech (which actually does not report anyone’s words, but constructs them through the incorporation into the speaker’s perspective), the act of quoting is less easy to grasp: for instance, it may not be identified as such by the addressee, and speakers themselves might not be aware of referring to prior discourse. Between these two extremes, it is also possible for the speaker to mark their speech as ‘reported’, but for the addressee to misunderstand the context from which the quotation is drawn. This context shift is an essential property of quoting: an element of a prior Context A is incorporated into a new Context B. Quotative markers – typographic ones such as quotation marks and italics, verbal ones such as ‘say’, or prosodic and gestural ones – are usually employed to clearly indicate the quoted segments; they help make an utterance recognisable as a quotation and to draw the addressee’s attention to the disruption of speech that quotations represent, though they are never obligatory.
The book comprises 16 chapters divided into two parts plus an introduction. Part I, ‘Quoting Now’, is devoted to contemporary quoting practices, including five chapters on computer-mediated communication, two focusing on specific German quoting expressions and one on quoting practices in academic settings. Part II, ‘Quoting Then’, concentrates on diachronic analyses and historic corpora without losing touch with modernity, since two articles compare old texts with modern ones. The diachronic overview sheds light on how surprisingly similar quoting functions can be across space and time, and in fact similar investigations are often pursued in Part I as well, since they offer valuable insight into discourse variation or continuity.
All contributions are corpus based, but they range in scale and scope from small corpora produced by the researcher for specific research purposes (Landert, Arendholz, Finkbeiner, to name just a few) to complex specialised corpora of professional discourse (Johnson) and large reference corpora such as the Corpus of Historical American English (Moore), and several adopt contrastive approaches. A common thread running across these different materials and genres concerns how speakers position themselves regarding other interactants. Throughout the contributions, two main functions of quotations are investigated: enhancing the speaker’s credibility and establishing new relationships.
Quoting is extensively used as a stance-taking strategy to contribute to the speaker’s credibility in various genres. Landert (Chapter 1) shows how journalists writing for UK newspapers draw upon other voices to help make news into reportable facts, since statements can be traced back to the original source. Similarly, Fetzer and Reber (Chapter 4) discuss how quotations in political interviews are used strategically to enable speakers to position themselves towards the source of quotation. In German newspapers on commemorations (Musolff, Chapter 5), quotations also reinforce the speaker’s credibility by drawing from well-known sources to provide an argument from authority. The central notions of authorship, intertextuality and transmission are often the object of explicit reflection, since attributing a quote to a source is never a neutral act, despite what journalists or politicians might pretend.
Second, quoting serves creating and maintaining new relationships with other interactants: a correctly recognised quotation helps establish a community of practice between speaker and addressee. In Chapter 7 on square quotes, Meibauer shows how quotation marks enable the speaker to distance himself or herself from the quoted segment. Modern and medieval scholars alike use quotations for this kind of relational work. In academic journals (Schneider, Chapter 8), quoting becomes a positioning strategy to present oneself with a positive professional image. Similar findings can be found in Lindner’s Chapter 16 on German medical case reports from the 17th and 18th centuries, where quoting serves self-praising and self-promoting goals, though quoting was not at that time a formal part of academic standards. Medieval authors already used quoting as a legitimisation strategy to embrace the spirit and tradition of other writers (Kirner-Ludwig and Zimmermann, Chapter 12). In court (Johnson, Chapter 15), quoting serves both the prosecution and the defence, whether to plead guilty or inability to commit a crime. Finally, quoting also represents a tool widely used for face-saving strategies. Chapters 2 and 3 (by Arendholz and Bös and Kleinke, respectively) show how quoting in message board communication or in online discussion forums serves interpersonal functions, driving the online community to respond with ad hominem evaluations or positive alignment.
Apart from the discursive functions of the aforementioned quotations, several papers, in particular based on historical corpora, address other issues related to quotes, such as specific constructions (Finkbeiner’s Chapter 6 on the German formula ‘X ist gut’), grammaticalisation processes (Aijmer’s Chapter 9 on lexical markers of quotation between 1560 and 1760), etymological issues (the verb quoth and quote in Middle English in Chapter 10 by Moore, and the terms quotation, citation and reference in Kirner-Ludwig and Zimmermann’s Chapter 12), pragmatic markers in direct speech passages (Lutzky, Chapter 14) or the link between Latin citations and the Vercelli Homilies (Chapter 11 by Rudolf).
Despite the heterogeneity quoting functions analysed, the volume fulfils its role: investigating the forms and functions of quoting from the Middle Ages up to the present day. The variety of the corpora surprisingly shows a significant continuity: as I said, quoting is everywhere.