Quotation and stance in online opinionating discourse

This paper revisits the use and function of quotation in opinionating discourses in hybrid contexts of news production and consumption, involving both legacy news media (now publishing online) and social media interactions occasioned by news stories. It investigates the kinds of recontextualization and stance meanings emerging in concrete contexts of use across a range of sources, with case studies focusing on quotative sparring (in creative reponse to newsworthy quotes), retroactive quotation in which the involvement of quotation is only revealed after the fact, hyperbolic and distorted quotations used for satirical purposes in parliamentary sketch writing, and both fictive and factual cases of social media quotation (or ‘socio-quoting’) for evaluative stance purposes. The analyses presented demonstrate the usefulness of confronting samples of contemporary online opinionating discourse in order to reaffirm and update existing theoretical notions in quotation research such as recontextualization and representation.