Article published In:
Internet Pragmatics: Online-First Articles

Being sensible is now a radical concept I LOVE that quote haha

Quotations in political speeches and user comments

| University of Augsburg

This paper examines how the communicative act of quotation may contribute to ordinary users’ discussion of politics through user comments following up on government- and opposition-party speeches during a pre-election and a non-election period in Britain. It analyses the linguistic formatting of the communicative act – as direct, indirect, mixed, hypothetical and scare quotation – and its production-format-specific distribution in the speeches of the political elite and in ordinary-user comments following up on the elite discourse. Particular attention is given to (1) references to the constitutive parts of the communicative act of quotation, to its felicity conditions and to social-context coordinates, (2) the discursive functions which quotation may fulfil in the two different contexts and timeframes, and (3) their perlocutionary effects.

Keywords: communicative action, context, elite political speech, perlocutionary effect, production format, quotation, social media, user comments
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Pragmatics meets mediated communicative action
  • 3.Quotation as communicative action
  • 4.Quotations in political speeches and users’ comments
    • 4.1Data and method
    • 4.2Linguistic formatting and distribution
    • 4.3Discursive function
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 13 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00109.fet
References (48)
Allan, Keith, Alessandro Capone, and Istvan Kecskes
(eds.) 2016 Pragmemes and Theories of Language Use: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology. Cham: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Arendholz, Jenny, Wolfram Bublitz, and Monika Kirner-Ludwig
(eds.) 2015 The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Austin, John L.
1975 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boyd, Michael S.
2014 “(New) participatory framework on YouTube? Commenter interaction in US political speeches.” Journal of Pragmatics 721: 46–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brendel, Elke, Jörg Meibauer, and Markus Steinbach
2011 “Exploring the meaning of quotation.” In Understanding Quotation, ed. by Elke Brendel, Jörg Meibauer, and Markus Steinbach, 1–33. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bublitz, Wolfram
2015 “Introducing quoting as a ubiquitous meta-communicative act.” In The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, ed. by Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz, and Monika Kirner-Ludwig, 1–26. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Buchstaller, Isabelle, and Ingrid van Alphen
2012 “Introductory remarks on new and old quotatives.” In Quotatives: Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. by Isabelle Buchstaller, and Ingrid Van Alphen, xi–xxx, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, Herbert H., and Thomas B. Carlson
1982 “Hearers and speech acts.” Language 58(2): 332–373. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, Herbert H., and Richard J. Gerrig
1990 “Quotations as demonstrations.” Language 66(4): 764–805. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clayman, Steven
1995 “Defining moments, presidential debates, and the dynamics of quotability.” Journal of Communication 45(3): 118–146. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
D’Ancona, Matthew
2017 Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back. London: Ebury Press.Google Scholar
Fetzer, Anita
2000 “Negotiating validity claims in political interviews.” Text & Talk 20(4): 415–460. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002a “Negotiating rejections: A socio-cultural analysis.” Multilingua 21(4): 399–422. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002b “ ‘Put bluntly, you have something of a credibility problem’: Sincerity and credibility in political interviews.” In Politics as Talk and Text: Analytic Approaches to Political Discourse, ed. by Paul Chilton, and Christina Schäffner, 173–201. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 “ ‘When you came into office you said that your government would be different’: Forms and functions of quotations in mediated political discourse.” In The Dynamics of Political Discourse: Forms and Functions of Follow-Ups, ed. by Anita Fetzer, Elda Weizman, and Lawrence N. Berlin, 245–273. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2020 “ ‘And I quote’: Forms and functions of quotations in Prime Minister’s questions.” Journal of Pragmatics 1571: 89–100. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2021 “Quotation, meta-data and transparency of sources in mediated political discourse.” In The Pragmatics of Adaptability, ed. by Daniel Silva, and Jacob Mey, 141–168. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fetzer, Anita, and Peter Bull
2012 “Doing leadership in political speech: Semantic processes and pragmatic inferences.” Discourse & Society 23(2): 127–144. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 “Quoting ordinary people in Prime Minister’s questions.” In The Construction of ‘Ordinariness’ across Media Genres, ed. by Anita Fetzer, and Elda Weizman, 73–101. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fetzer, Anita, and Elda Weizman
2018 “ ‘What I would say to John and everyone like John is …’: The construction of ordinariness through quotations in mediated political discourse.” Discourse & Society 29(5): 495–513. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy
1993 English Grammar: A Function-Based Introduction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Grice, Herbert P.
1975 “Logic and conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 31, Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole, and Jerry L. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Gross, Daniel Henrik
2024 “The discursive construction of ordinary people in online media discourse: A contrastive analysis of discursive prosodies in English and German.” PhD dissertation, University of Augsburg. [URL]
Gruber, Helmut
2015 “Policy-oriented argumentation or ironic evaluation: A study of verbal quoting and positioning in Austrian politicians’ parliamentary debate contributions.” Discourse Studies 17(6): 682–702. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gumperz, John J.
1992 “Contextualization and understanding.” In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, ed. by Alessandro Duranti, and Charles Goodwin, 229–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
1996 “The linguistic and cultural relativity of inference.” In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, ed. by John J. Gumperz, and Stephen C. Levinson, 374–406. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen
1987 Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns [The Theory of Communicative Action]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Ilie, Cornelia
2003 “Discourse and metadiscourse in parliamentary debates.” Journal of Language and Politics 2(1): 71–92. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaffe, Alexandra
2009 “Entextualization, mediatization and authentication: Orthographic choice in media transcripts.” Text & Talk 29(5): 571–594. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kirner-Ludwig, Monika
2020 “Creation, dissemination and uptake of fake-quotes in lay political discourse on Facebook and Twitter.” Journal of Pragmatics 1571: 101–118. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kozinets, Robert
2010 Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Landert, Daniela, and Andreas H. Jucker
2011 “Private and public in mass media communication: From letters to the editor to online commentaries.” Journal of Pragmatics 431: 1422–1434. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C.
1979 “Activity types and language.” Linguistics 171: 365–399. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Linell, Per
2009 Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically: Interactional and Contextual Theories of Human Sense-Making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.Google Scholar
Mey, Jacob L.
2018 “How social is the internet: A pragmatic view.” Internet Pragmatics 1(1): 13–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oishi, Etsuko, and Anita Fetzer
2016 “Expositives in discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 961: 49–59. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reber, Elisabeth
2021 Quoting in Parliamentary Question Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Saka, Paul
2013 “Quotation.” Philosophy Compass 8(10): 935–949. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, John R.
1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Short, Michael
1991 “Speech presentation, the novel and the press.” In The Taming of the Text: Explorations in Language, Literature and Culture, ed. by Willie Van Peer, 61–81. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah
2007 Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Warner, Michael
2002 Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Weiss, Daniel
2020 “Analogical reasoning with quotations.” Journal of Pragmatics 1551: 101–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weizman, Elda, and Anita Fetzer
2021 “The discursive construction of accountability for communicative action to citizens: A contrastive analysis across Israeli and British media discourse.” Intercultural Pragmatics 18(5): 605–632. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Deidre
2012 “Metarepresentation in linguistic communication.” In Meaning and Relevance, ed. by Deidre Wilson, and Dan Sperber, 230–258. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yus, Francisco
2011 “Identity-related issues in meme communication.” Internet Pragmatics 1(1): 113–133. DOI logoGoogle Scholar