1.1Quoting

By quoting, we understand the discursive, translingual, and transcontextual process of embedding real or staged-as-real extracts from formerly produced communicational offers into new, emerging communicational offers (Haapanen & Perrin, 2017Haapanen, L., & Perrin, D. (2017) Media and quoting. Understanding the purposes, roles, and processes of quoting in mass and social media. In D. Perrin & C. Cotter (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language and media (pp. 424–441). London: Routledge. , 2019Haapanen, L., & Perrin, D. (2019) Translingual quoting in journalism: Behind the scenes of Swiss television newsrooms. In L. Davier & K. Conway (Eds.), Journalism and translation in the era of convergence (pp. 15–42). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ). This definition calls for a brief discussion of its key elements: discursive, translingual, staged-as-real, transcontextual, and emerging.

We consider quoting to be a discursive process because a quoting locutor 2 interacts with quoted locutor 1 by embedding his pre-existing utterance into her own emerging one. By doing so, she introduces not only his original utterance but also some aspects of locutor 1 to the addressees of her new utterance. As a result, the practice of quoting serves to pass on former discursive contributions in new contexts. These new contributions, authored by new locutors, give the floor to and embed the former ones.

Translinguality is a key element of quoting because no two locutors speak precisely the same language, nor does a single locutor speak the same language in two different contexts. Thus, when an utterance that was produced in context 1 is reproduced in context 2, it becomes part of the context 2 language. A radical example: Quoting a source’s sophisticated wording from a formal context 1 in a colloquial context 2 may contribute to the quoter’s ironic language.

Staged-as-real means that, in domains such as organizational communication, quotes do not need to be actual citations as long as the allocated source could have said what appears to be her original utterance. In other words: In many domains’ discourses, quotes often are not verbatim and can even be invented, for example, to make a media release sound vivid (Jacobs, 1999Jacobs, G. (1999) Preformulating the news: An analysis of the metapragmatics of press releases. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ). Hence our differentiation between citation in the strict academic sense and (citation-like) quote in a broader sense.

The above example from organizational communication highlights the trans­contextual aspects of quoting. When utterances from context 1 are taken up in context 2, they transgress discursive boundaries on multiple and scaling layers, for example, boundaries between domains such as family and work, organizations such as banks and media companies and settings such as newsrooms. The prefix trans highlights that, in real-world contexts, such boundaries tend to be fluid and dynamic.

By emerging, we understand that the quoted utterance interacts with its new linguistic co-text and social context, which can result, in context 2, in a categorically new – e.g., ironic – meaning of what was said in context 1. Generally, neither locutor 1 nor locutor 2 can predict the discursive outcome of the quoting process. Moreover, in many cases, locutor 1 neither intends to be quoted nor can he influence the way locutor 2 quotes him. Sometimes, he never knows she quoted him.

1.2Recontextualization

Whereas the term quoting focuses on agents’ discursive practices, recontextualization foregrounds material and operational aspects. It includes the three linguistic operations performed when locutor 2 extracts parts of utterances by locutor 1 from their original context 1 (de-contextualization) in order to reformulate them by deleting parts and sometimes adding new ones (textualization) before embedding the result in a new discursive context 2 (en-contextualization). (Haapanen, 2017Haapanen, L. (2017) Quoting practices in written journalism. Article-based doctoral dissertation, University of Helsinki. Available from https://​helda​.helsinki​.fi​/handle​/10138​/174618, building on Linell, 1998Linell, P. (1998) Approaching dialogue: Talk, interaction and contexts in dialogical perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. .)

De-contextualization separates a semiotic complex from its co-text and context. This means that its connections to both the semiotic and situational environments are cut off. As a result, the meaning that can be attributed to the – now decontextualized – semiotic complex widens in scope and decreases in depth. To give an extreme example, a politician’s “no, never,” once decoupled from co- and context, only means that this person, under certain circumstances, is capable of total denial.

Textualization then processes the semiotic complex itself. The foci of textualization range from overall linguistic modes to style and grammar and local details such as spelling. For example, locutor 2 can write down the utterance “no, f***ing never” spoken by locutor 1, delete the emphatic word she considers inappropriate, and expand the elliptical construction into a full proposition by applying the grammar rules she deems fit for purpose, “No, I have never done so.”

En-contextualization, finally, embeds the textualized complex in a new semiotic environment that becomes part of a new communicative context. This is how locutor 1’s “no, never” from a casual conversation at a dinner party, which was recorded overtly or undercover, can find itself in a document that is meant, by locutor 2, to entertain its audience, to accuse or defend this politician in court, or to explain society at large how politics works.

1.3Linguistic recycling

But why linguistic recycling? Why yet another concept for a practice that seems the same? Neither quoting nor recontextualization can foreground resource aspects of using utterances again. In this issue of the AILA Review, we focus on these aspects of quoting, as materialized through recontextualization. We are interested in discussing how and for whom language users – both as individuals and as communities – save resources and create value by using utterances again.

This calls for a brief discussion of recycling in general. Besides being an often ideologically loaded buzzword that helps sell goods and services, the term designates the process of extracting entire products or their parts after the end of the products’ life cycle and using them again to start life cycles of new products. To give an extreme example, a procedure has been developed and successfully applied to improve tar pavement with used toilet paper.11.See, e.g., https://​www​.dutchwatersector​.com​/news​/road​-constructor​-kws​-uses​-recycled​-toilet​-paper​-to​-improve​-asphalt​-pavement​-in​-amsterdam

Other, perhaps more familiar examples include recycling PET bottles to produce garbage bags (downcycling towards less precious products), new PET bottles (crosscycling), as well as clothes or even jewelry (upcycling towards more precious products). Another example of upcycling is the creation of alloy watch cases from tin cans. Whereas the buyers of such watches are proudly informed about the sources of the materials used,22. https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=cXCyT8s​_rjg people walking on former toilet paper tend not to be put in the picture.

Taking the term recycling to the field of applied linguistics enables us to draw analogies from the value production chains of material goods to those of symbolic goods, such as everyday talk, professional communication, and public discourse. Here, too, both individuals and communities have developed procedures to down-, cross-, and upcycle utterances, for example, when using the quote of a politician’s casual utterance as a headline of breaking news.

Selling a news piece with a formerly casual utterance that has been tweaked for discursive appeal is what we consider a case of upcycling. Reusing the utterance in more or less the same shape within text bodies of social media and mass media news over and over again corresponds to the above crosscycling example. Using the utterance as a text dummy in a layout sketch is a clear case of down­cycling. So much for the easy cases.

What is really interesting to consider are cases such as the use of Roman emperor Caesar’s “veni, vidi, vici”33. Atkinson (1984)Atkinson, M. (1984) Our masters’ voices: The language and body language of politics. London: Routledge. has argued that there is a preference for utterances which come in three-part lists to be quoted. to illustrate properties of Latin grammar in a textbook. Or picking samples from large data bodies of literary work to illustrate language change across centuries. In both cases, we have good reasons to assume that the original locutors had something greater in mind than the purposes for which the utterances have been recycled now. At the same time, however, the outcome of the recycling process, in its news context, adds a value that the original utterance was not meant to create. This is to say that even in a case of downcycling from a locutor-1 perspective, the recycling process results in an emergent value in context 2. Turning the leftover handmade designer clothes after sales into felt carpet instead of burning them allows new users to take advantage of some of the textile potential in a new way.44.This example is NOT invented; see, e.g., https://​news​.hslu​.ch​/vom​-alten​-pulli​-zum​-neuen​-teppich/

Yet there are fundamental ontological differences between material and semiotic goods. In the physical world of our universe, the same set of particles seems to have been recycled over and over since the big bang. In the semiotic world, however, recurrence, in general, and recycling, in particular, refer to the type, not the token. The utterance itself, as a physical (audible, visible) event, can be considered unique, inseparably intertwined with its context and therefore volatile.

Given these ontological differences, one might ask whether shifting the concept of recycling from the physical to the semiotic world makes sense at all. Our answer is a threefold yes. First, these ontological differences apply to all the concepts taken from the physical to the semiotic world, such as producing a text or processing an utterance. When producing a car or processing plastic materials, the source materials are used up. Luckily enough, with language and signs, this is, in general, not the case.

Second, if it makes sense to think about linguistic capital, it makes sense to investigate linguistic practices of dealing with such resources. Which resources, such as knowledge, time, technical tools, and social networks, are required to produce a certain text? Who is able to invest such resources? How are the source texts allocated, taken up, deconstructed and reassembled? And who benefits from the value added in the semiotic workflow from the sources to the target texts?

Third, and most importantly, there is similarity in social relevance. In both the physical and the material world, the concepts of down-, cross-, and upcycling refer to practices by which resources are reused for the benefit of those who do so and, in some cases, other stakeholders and society at large. Systematically scrutinizing motivations and consequences related to the reuse of, e.g., PET bottles and academic citations can end up in exciting and, perhaps, inconvenient insights.

1.4Medium

Reusing language is closely related to discursive media by which the utterances can be captured, be made durable, move across time and space, be picked up, and be connected with new co- and contexts. In a very broad view, many things can serve as a discursive medium: a sound wave carrier such as the air; a system of signs such as the alphabet; a natural language such as Japanese; a material equipment such as pen and paper; or a digital technology such as the Internet.

In a stricter sense, a medium is a technical means to produce, store, reproduce, and transmit signs. In such an understanding, media include, for example, postcards, books, websites, and social media platforms – as well as their socio-technological environments, such as postal networks, the printing press, and the World Wide Web. Every form of human(oid) communication except face-to-face conversations uses such technical tools.

For the purpose of analyzing linguistic recycling as outlined above, we divide media in the sense of technical means into three prototypical categories: first, individual media such as the telephone, email systems, and message platforms such as WhatsApp; second, mass media such as the press, broadcasting, online publishing; and third, social media, such as Instagram or TikTok, where technologies and practices of individual and mass communication overlap and foster emergent new practices.55.For a theory of scalable sociality, see Miller et al., 2016Miller, D., Costa, E., Haynes, N., McDonald, T., Nicolescu, R., Sinanan, J., Spyer, J., Venkatraman, S., & Wang, X. (2016) How the world changed social media. London: UCL Press.

Recycling utterances in individual media such as phone calls or emails results in a small additional spread of the original utterance and, as a consequence, in a limited potential yield of linguistic capital. There is only one addressee to be reached with these individual media. By contrast, social media, which can reach communities of followers, as well as mass media, basically enable users to leverage their capital by recycling others’ socially prestigious utterances in their own co- and contexts.

Across these categories, certain technologies constrain certain practices of linguistic recycling while enabling and fostering others. Hypertext technologies, for example, allow for clickable references to utterances from others, which means that these utterances can be reached in new contexts through hyperlinks, without being textualized in the new co- and context. Non-hypertext media, by contrast, require the explicit textualization of recycled utterances.

2.1Stakeholders

The first pair of contributions focuses on stakeholders of linguistic recycling – in particular, on agents intending their texts to be recycled and on agents whose texts have been recycled. Jakobs & Digmayer investigate market analysts’ practices of writing reusable texts (Paper I). Burgess & Martín-Martín explore reactions of academics finding their work (mis-)quoted by others (Paper II). Both approaches identify domain-specific regularities of utilizing semiotic resources through linguistic recycling.

Paper I.The invisible supporters: Writing for reuse
Eva-Maria Jakobs & Claas Digmayer

This contribution investigates how feedback is used to support the production of texts for the purposes of reuse. The data – market reports with written comments – were collected in an entrepreneur training program. The study investigates how supervisors use commenting and how the goal of creating a highly reusable text source guides the feedback process. The data were examined quantitatively (frequency of commenting) and qualitatively (functional comment types).

The results offer valuable insights into writing processes in business-related settings and how professionals interact to ensure a reusable product. The findings indicate a broad range of comment functions. The study distinguishes two main fields of application: (1) feedback activities focusing on reports as reusable resource and (2) feedback activities focusing on collaboration and workflows as well as related functional comment types.

A theory of linguistic text recycling should consider variants of planned resource production. In this study, text recycling is a functional component of a full cycle of communication activities. All activities support one aim: the creation of pitches based on resources that are written for this purpose. Studies into resource production offer insights into how process and product are shaped by factors such as domain-specific constraints and/or concepts of resource properties that support linguistic down-, cross-, or upcycling.

Paper II.Linguistic recycling and its relationship to academic conflict: An analysis of authors’ responses to direct quotation
Sally Burgess & Pedro Martín-Martín

This contribution looks at linguistic recycling as direct quotation and its role in generating and maintaining academic conflict. It examines quoted authors’ responses to the reuse of their words in the course of a conflict exchange. The three authors at the center of the exchange were asked to comment on quotations of their work. Social network theory was used to show how a conflict exchange involving extensive use of quotation draws others into an academic debate of this kind.

The three authors emphasized that they regard quotation as a valid practice in academic debate even when their words are quoted as part of a critique of their position. They had no issues with the majority of the quotations, particularly in the case of extended embedded quotations where their original co-text was maintained. However, where single words and phrases were incorporated into a new co-text, their comments indicated a desire to restore their original meanings.

When linguistic recycling as direct quotation is used in conflict exchanges, it contributes to the maintenance of the exchange, especially when the quotation is incorporated into a new co-text rather than embedded with the original propositional content intact. Quoted authors may then seek to reinstate their intended meanings in a subsequent turn in the exchange. The authors of this contribution suggest parallels with conflict in other domains where incorporated quotations may be used to construct a negative perception of a quoted author.

2.2Language

The second pair of contributions focuses on the relation between recycling and language itself – in particular, on language generation and language acquisition as linguistic recycling. Haapanen & Leppänen analyze data-based language generation in automated news production (Paper III). Laalo & Argus examine how children learn by recycling their parents’ utterances (Paper IV). Both approaches shed light on the blurred line between quoting and recurrence in linguistic recycling.

Paper III.Recycling a genre for news automation: The production of Valtteri the Election Bot
Lauri Haapanen & Leo Leppänen

This contribution analyzes the production of a computer program that generates election news without human intervention. The authors, who are part of the team that created the program, explain how they identified, encapsulated, and repositioned – that is recontextualized – the determinant aspects of the genre online news story in the algorithm of the program. This is followed by the introduction of a user test.

The unflattering results of the user test lead the authors to question the idea that, particularly in the field of journalism, natural language generation (NLG) systems should mimic genres that have developed organically in human communication. Instead, the authors suggest that developmental work in the field of news automation should aim to create novel genres based on the inherent strengths of NLG. So they present a few suggestions as to what such a genre could include.

The contribution shows that not only texts but also entire genres and the concept of genre itself can be recycled. It highlights the vulnerable balance of the interplay between agents, languages, and domains; should this balance be shaken, as in the case of algorithms replacing journalists, the linguistic outcome risks missing the domain-related requirements. Therefore, the change cannot be expected to happen as a linear development but through dramatic change, enacted here by recycling the genre concept and assembling a categorically new genre.

Paper IV.Linguistic recycling in language acquisition: Child-directed speech and child speech in the study of language acquisition
Klaus Laalo & Reili Argus

This contribution explains that quoting and linguistic recycling play a key role in the children language acquisition. In this process, child-directed speech (CDS) offers the child a model for how to produce linguistic forms, which he or she then repeats. The contribution also discusses the quoting strategies and practices from the parents’ side, thus highlighting the interactional nature of the language learning.

In the early stage of language learning, children learn by rote and repeat forms, which they have stored as chunks. Parents facilitate this process by using word forms that have simple inflection patterns. Based on CDS, children then create rules and analogies that develop the child speech (CS) towards a rich variety of forms. Adults, too, repeat and elaborate CS, for example, by quoting children’s reduced utterances, albeit by using full forms, which children can again repeat.

Children’s language learning highlights that linguistic recycling indeed – despite the uniqueness of individual utterances – is a vital part of our linguistic resource from the very beginning. It also tangibly forefronts the reflexive nature of the process: by reusing utterances, and consciously manipulating them (especially in CDS), linguistic recycling is used to both influence the extralingual world and improve the resource itself.

2.3Domain

The third pair of contributions focuses on domains of linguistic recycling – in particular, on the contrast between generous and strict domain-specific regulations. Merminod explores the creative potential of narrative recycling in the news (Paper V). Anson et al. investigate self-plagiarism in various academic STEM66.The abbreviation STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. disciplines (Paper VI). Both approaches show how different expectations and traditions result in different, often undisputed, norms and practices of linguistic recycling.

Paper V.Narrative analysis applied to text production: Investigating the processes of quoting in the making of a broadcast news story
Gilles Merminod

The contribution explores the scope and limits of linguistic recycling in everyday newswriting. Drawing on narrative analysis and linguistic ethnography, it investigates a case where a team of TV news practitioners translates and rewrites a personal story to insert it into the news item they are producing. The contribution conducts a detailed analysis of the news production processes and the narrative transformations pertaining to the recontextualization of discourse.

The analysis shows that recontextualization affects the rendering of story worlds (space-time, events, perspectives on experience), and leads to a homogenization of discourse. This homogenization rests upon the news practitioners’ orientation towards consistency, both in terms of what is told and how it is told. It helps them to take advantage of the existing convergences between the diverse stretches of discourse they work with.

When it comes to studying the recycling of a story, the tools of narrative analysis prove to be key, allowing us to tackle the specific issue relating to the recontextualization of experiences and events. The contribution, through its careful and fine-grained analysis, reveals the extent to which linguistic recycling is embedded in the social and material world: linguistic recycling always emerges from specific practices and ecologies.

Paper VI.Reuse in STEM research writing: Rhetorical and practical considerations and challenges
Chris M. Anson, Susanne Hall, Michael Pemberton, & Cary Moskovitz

This contribution investigates the metadiscourse surrounding text recycling, often problematically called self-plagiarism. The study analyzes structured interviews with editors of academic journals, and it focuses on the editors’ varying constructs of text recycling in the context of their personal and professional attitudes and practices within their academic disciplines. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using principles of grounded theory to derive central themes.

Results show a range of beliefs and practices concerning text recycling. Central themes determining editors’ varying degrees of the acceptance of text recycling include issues of professional integrity, self-representation, and fears of impropriety; efficiency and accuracy of content; the nature, source, and destination of the material being recycled; perceptions of ownership; and copyright. Because explicit norms and guidelines are uncommon and frequently contradictory, authors’ composing processes are made more complicated.

Based on varying beliefs and practices across academic disciplines and publishing outlets, it may be inadvisable to establish universal guidelines or norms concerning text recycling. However, structured, research-based discussions – with authors and editors of journals within specific disciplines as well as transdisciplinary professional and scholarly organizations – could lead to more uniformly agreed-upon practices that could help all of those involved in academic publishing to be less conflicted and better informed.

2.4Culture

The fourth pair of contributions focuses on cultures of linguistic recycling within a single domain – in particular, on inter- and cross-cultural differences in journalism. Whereas Cope compares quoting as a means of persuading readers in US, UK, and Australian newspapers (Paper VII), Matsushita investigates how Japanese newspapers deal with transquoting two US-American presidents (Paper VIII). Both approaches outline inter- and intracultural risks and opportunities of linguistic recycling.

Paper VII.Quoting to persuade: A critical linguistic analysis of quoting in US, UK, and Australian newspaper opinion texts
Jennifer Cope

This contribution looks at the linguistic construction of quotations in single-authored opinion texts in US, UK, and Australian financial and general newspapers during the global financial crisis. The study investigates how writers use quotations to discursively position themselves and others to persuade readers to align with their arguments, and it shows the implications of this for quoting practices and media literacy. Quotations were analyzed using a specially-created integrated framework, and authors were interviewed on their practices.

Results show that US and UK authors are generally positioned as insiders during the global financial crisis, while Australian authors, who tend to rely more heavily on external voices, are positioned as outsiders. In general newspapers, the greater reliance on quoted sources to convey authority conversely implies that financial text authors rely more on their own authoritative voice when discussing the financial crisis. Specifying sources of quotations is a common practice among opinion writers, with sources considered high status affirming a writer’s authoritativeness.

This contributes to the concept of linguistic recycling by providing evidence for the quoting process and practice across the cross-cultural domains of financial and general newspaper opinion texts in the US, the UK and Australia. It demonstrates that quotes are instantiated and recontextualized, shape (and are shaped by) linguistic constructions, contextual factors, functions and meanings. Practitioner reflections contribute to sharing quoting practices with other media practitioners.

Paper VIII.Reporting quotable yet untranslatable speech: Observations of shifting practices by Japanese newspapers from Obama to Trump
Kayo Matsushita

Japanese newspapers often use direct quotes, and it falls to journalists to translate quotes in other languages into Japanese. In this transquoting process, journalists factor in a unique variable: translatability. This contribution analyzes how President Trump’s “quotable yet untranslatable” utterances were transquoted by the two largest newspapers in Japan by comparing them with those of President Obama.

The analysis showed that Japanese newspapers wrote more articles about Trump in his first hundred days in office than about his predecessor. However, Obama’s statements were quoted more often and at greater length, while direct quotes from Trump were less frequent and shorter. Multiple examples suggested that journalists found Trump to be more newsworthy but less quotable than Obama because Trump’s utterances were difficult to translate.

The author found that journalists tended to simplify (under-recycle) or avoid quoting (throw away) Trump’s speech, partly to work around its untranslatability. Untranslatability proved a barrier to linguistic recycling, and journalists often relied on recycling quotes from Trump’s more-translatable proxies. The net effect is a depiction of Trump as an ineffective speaker, a risk that can be recognized when linguistic recycling involves translation.

2.5Media

The fifth pair of contributions focuses on the media of linguistic recycling – in particular, on their potential to down-, cross-, and upcycle utterances while reusing them. Whereas Reber analyzes how visual material is upcycled to increase credibility in British parliamentary interaction (Paper IX), Pfurtscheller explores the down- and crosscycling functions of quoting news snippets in social media (Paper X). Both approaches foreshadow the growing complexity of linguistic recycling in transmodal settings.

Paper IX.Visuo-material performances: ‘Literalized’ quotations in prime minister’s questions
Elisabeth Reber

This contribution is concerned with visuo-material performances of literalized quoting, i.e., verbatim reproductions of original utterances, in Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), a parliamentary question time in the British House of Commons. Drawing on authentic video footage, the interactional linguistic analysis investigates how speakers recruit and display – what they claim to be – original documents for a mediated audience when making quotations during the question-answer sequences at PMQs.

Visuo-material performances of literalized quoting in direct speech are characterized by a cluster of recurrent prosodic, lexico-syntactic, visual, and material cues involving the speaker’s recruiting their notes. A focus on cases where speakers claim to display original documents revealed that (1) a leaked confidential document can be deployed as a resource for ridicule of the political opponent, (2) a single cover page can be constituted as an entire report, and (3) selected text chunks can be enacted for rhetorical effect.

Parliamentary speakers’ claims of showing original documents represents a rhetorical device that serves to display not only evidential but also experiential access to their sources, lending speakers upgraded authority and credibility in the House. Notably, this practice extends the concept of linguistic recycling from a vocal and verbal method to a material method, in that not only past utterances but also documents taken from other contexts are upcycled for the speakers’ in-situ communicative purposes.

Paper X.More than recycled snippets of news: Quote cards as recontextualized discourse on social media
Daniel Pfurtscheller

This contribution explores how snippets of news discourse are recycled and shared on social media. How do journalists recontextualize quotations into news bites to be recirculated on social media and how do users engage with such quote-centered genres? Drawing on a Facebook dataset from public broadcast media, the study combines a quantitative exploration of emerging news genres with a qualitative and multimodal microanalysis of online interaction.

The analysis explores how legacy media use quote-centered posts and highlights the form and function of quote cards (multimodal ensembles of written quotes and visuals). The findings show that quote cards enable the (re-)dialogization of user reactions as imaginary dialogue. Differences in the multimodal design can influence user discussions, also fostering problematic practices that call for practitioners’ attention.

Quote cards are a prime example of how linguistic recycling facilitates shareability on digital media environments, thus shaping participation and public discourse: affording a prominent presentation of written quotations in a branded, highly visual typographic design; enabling online interaction related to and fueled by news discourses; and providing intertextual anchor points for user discussion and social positioning.

3.1Linguistic recycling is realized through practices of augmenting linguistic capital

The contributions in this issue explain various cases of the situated activity of quoting. Given its wide range of functions, quoting influences and is influenced by social structures from micro to macro levels and their interplay in human interaction. Thus, quoting and its linguistic result, the quotes, can be seen as rich points (Agar, 2004Agar, M. H. (2004) We have met the other and we’re all nonlinear. Ethnography as a nonlinear dynamic system. Complexity, 10(2), 16–24. , p. 17) in the multimodal discursive construction of society through the iterative reuse of text parts in new contexts – in other words, through recurrent recontextualization.

Since neither quoting nor recontextualization foreground aspects of reusing utterances to save resources and create value, we have outlined a concept we term linguistic recycling. In analogy with the value production chains of material goods to those of semiotic goods, individuals and communities use practices to recycle utterances. Depending on whether linguistic capital increases, remains the same, or decreases, we have differentiated between down-, cross-, and upcycling.

Figure 1 visualizes the key insights from this introduction, Part 2 of which is based on the ten contributions of the entire issue. The figure complements the pre-existing concepts of quoting and recontextualization with the novel one, linguistic recycling. By doing so, it emphasizes the cyclic, yet dynamic, value creation of language use: Cycle by cycle, semiotic value emerges or disappears in the interaction of language use with its co- and contexts.

Quoting refers to a language user’s discursive, translingual, and transcontextual process of embedding a real or staged-as-real utterance into emerging communicational offer. Its material and operational aspects are foregrounded through recontextualization; the agent takes an utterance out of its original context (de-contextualization), harmonizes its form and functions to meet the anticipated outcome (textualization), and inserts it in a new co-text and context (en-contextualization).

The concept of linguistic recycling, then, foregrounds the resource aspects of using utterances again. It points to the process – and the related practices – of preserving, generating, and augmenting linguistic capital through down-, cross-, or upcycling between contexts 1 and 2. To solve contextual friction, language users need to balance the interplay of stakeholders, languages, domains, traditions, and media. The next sections elaborate on these points.

3.2Linguistic recycling is characterized by the interplay of five key drivers

Language use, in general, can be perceived as an interplay of five key drivers. Individual and organizational stakeholders use language and other semiotic systems within a certain domain of real life, which is “domin-ated” by rules and norms as well as traditions or cultures of practicing life within and across these domains. All this takes place through a medium, which is not a mere mediator but also facilitates or even fosters emergent new practices of language use.

A deeper understanding of linguistic recycling requires us to juxtapose the drivers of semiotic and, in particular, linguistic products in contexts 1 and 2. Whereas language users negotiate the interplay of these drivers often unconsciously, researchers need to take them into account systematically when answering theoretically and practically relevant questions about linguistic recycling. Examples of questions foregrounding specific drivers include:

As for stakeholders: How do market analysts refine their reports to make them successfully recycled – verbatim or by paraphrasing – into a new context as part of startups’ pitches in front of buyers and partners (Jacobs & Digmayer, this issue)? And how do scholars, learning that they have been cited by peers in an academic debate, see this process of reframing and repurposing of their words from a value perspective. (Burgess & Martín-Martín, this issue)

As for language: How is the genre of a news story, evolved over the centuries, transformed in the algorithm of a computer program that automatically generates news stories (Haapanen & Leppänen, this issue)? How is the language, evolved over timeframes ranging from millennia (e.g., grammar) to months and weeks (e.g., neologisms), recycled when passed on from parents’ to their children (Laalo & Argus, this issue).

As for domains: How is a security guard’s narrative, recorded at the site of an air crash, recycled through “neither a tightly planned nor an arbitrary process” to meet the requirements of a TV news report (Merminod, this issue)? How do scholars, recycling their own textual material in subsequent papers, balance between explicit and implicit norms and procedures in what is also called self-plagiarism (Anson et al., this issue).

As for culture: How are quotes in opinion texts, published in US, UK, and Australian newspapers, related to the socio-cultural pattern of supporting authorial opinions and persuading readers to align with authorial viewpoints (Cope, this issue)? How do cultural and linguistic differences between the original and target contexts stop Japanese journalists from directly quoting President Trump’s utterances (Matsushita, this issue).

As for media: How is the evidential authority of recycled words, as presented in the British Parliament, leveraged by visually displaying what is claimed to be an original document from context 1 (Reber, this issue)? How do quote cards – offerings remixing text and image on Facebook – make readers visit the full article from which the quotes and photos are drawn, and encourage them to comment on and further share the recycled resources (Pfurtscheller, this issue).

All in all, this issue approaches linguistic recycling in a phenomenon-first way and keeps the spectrum of discoveries, analyses, and theoretical approaches wide. The results as presented in the papers shed light on a wide and fruitful field of research: Linguistic recycling can be enacted consciously or unconsciously; processes and products are overt or covert; practices deal with single words and entire texts or even genres; and in doing so, they follow exact guidelines or take place spontaneously.

3.3Linguistic recycling is endlessly recursive

At the same time, the general dynamics of linguistic recycling shine through the papers combined in this issue. Reusing language is related to and motivated by basic practices of social development such as saving and leveraging one’s own and others’ creative semiotic resources. Recycling utterances can preserve, generate, and augment linguistic capital.77.Symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1994Bourdieu, P. (1994) Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action. Paris: Seuil., 161) is represented by and realized through cultural means, which include linguistic means: « J’appelle capital symbolique n’importe quelle espèce de capital (économique, culturel, scolaire ou social) lorsqu’elle est perçue selon des catégories de perception, des principes de vision et de division, des systèmes de classement, des schèmes classificatoires, des schèmes cognitifs, qui sont, au moins pour une part, le produit de l’incorporation des structures objectives du champ considéré, c-à-d de la structure de la distribution du capital dans le champ considéré. » We consider linguistic recycling a prototype case of generating symbolic capital. In practical life, language users tend to reuse utterances they consider successful contributions to social discourse.

The life cycle of utterances and other semiotic entities is basically endless. This means that iterative crosscycling does not use up the source utterance itself, and something once downcycled can easily be upcycled again later on. Moreover, the life cycle itself is also reproductive: once recycled, the original text parts keep on existing while the semiotic complexes that emerged from recycling provide new opportunities of being recycled themselves.

However, on closer consideration, things are more subtle than this. What happens, in terms of value creation, to metaphors that are used over and over again? In what situations do we feel comfortable with super-standardized language patterns, and when do we want to be challenged by disruptive language use? Do people still listen to the increasing amount of automatic acoustic warnings such as “mind the gap” in public spaces? – Such questions emerge from reading the papers in this issue.

3.4Linguistic recycling transgresses boundaries between up- and downcycling

The answers found within and in between the lines of the papers point towards a dynamic and complex conceptualization of recycling. There is no such thing as absolute up-, cross-, and downcycling. In line with the episteme of translanguaging (e.g., Li, 2017Li, W. (2017) Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9–30.), what happens is best theoretized as transcycling. The key question to ask is “what works for whom in what conditions” (Pawson & Tilley, 1997Pawson, R., & Tilley, N. (1997) Realistic evaluation. London: Sage., p. 72) when people process semiotic capital by reusing language.

Moreover, the research discussed in this issue has provided evidence that mediatization and, in particular, digitalization, play an increasing role in today’s linguistic recycling. Digital instances of language use, such as tweets and GIFs, can be recycled as exact copies, replicating themselves in social networks like viruses. This relation of mediatization and linguistic recycling is what the American performance artist Laurie Anderson foreshadowed in her piece “Language is a virus” in 1986.88.Googling the title will take you to the song and, at the same time, make you part of linguistic capitalism (Kaplan, 2014Kaplan, F. (2014) Linguistic capitalism and algorithmic mediation. Representations, 127(1), 57–63. ) that is based on linguistic recycling: Google breaks down the text people enter in search queries into statistical entities, which are used as training material for its algorithms in order to create and enhance services such as the advertisements, translations, and maps they sell.

An example: When we visit a webpage, we download copies of that webpage to our digital devices. So it could be argued that, in digital communication, linguistic recycling combines, on the one hand, the concepts of token-based recycling in the material world, and, on the other, of type-based recycling in the semiotic world, which results in an intriguing synthesis: In our digitalized world, we recycle semiotic and linguistic tokens (and not only types) – and we do it by saving the original token!

Outlined as multiperspective and scalable, this approach is meant to foster further analysis of linguistic recycling. Progress in research along its lines will help us better understand why and for whom language matters in what way.