Visuo-material performances
'Literalized’ quotations in prime minister’s questions
Drawn from a larger project on reported speech in parliamentary interaction (Reber, forthcoming), this paper studies visuo-material performances of so-called “literalized” (Rumsey, 1992) quoting, i.e., verbatim reproductions of original utterances. Taking an interactional-linguistic perspective, I analyze how participants accomplish ‘literalized’ reported speech through vocal, verbal, and visual cues, recruiting their material documents. The data are culled from video recordings of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), a parliamentary session where the Prime Minister (PM) takes questions from the Leader of the Opposition (LO) and Members of Parliament (MPs) at the British House of Commons. I place my focus on cases where speakers use original documents as visual aids, a classic rhetoric device of persuasion, and show how paper documents are constituted, celebrated, and rhetorically enacted as (seemingly) original documents in embodied, situated ways. As a conclusion, I argue that the display of original documents allows the speaker to make claims of having not only evidential but also experiential access to their sources, a practice that underpins their evidential authority.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Literature review
- 2.1Quotation and authorship in political discourse
- 2.2Quotation, embodiment, and visual aids
- 3.Data and methodology
- 4.Results
- 4.1The visuo-material performance of ‘literalized’ quotations
- 4.2An original document as a resource for ridicule of the political opponent
- 4.3The constitution of a single cover page as an entire report
- 4.4The enactment of selected text chunks for rhetorical effect
- 5.Summary and conclusions
- Notes
-
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