‹Speaking› Quotation Marks

Martina Lampert

‘Speaking’ Quotation Marks

Toward a Multimodal Analysis of Quoting Verbatim in English

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ISBN 978­‐3­‐631­‐59996-­9 (Print) ∙ E­‐ISBN 978-­3-­631-­74773-­5 (E-­PDF)
E-­ISBN 978­‐3­‐631­‐74774­‐2 (EPUB) ∙ E­‐ISBN 978-­3­‐631­‐74775­‐9 (MOBI)
DOI 10.3726/b.13406

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About the author

Martina Lampert teaches English Linguistics at the JGU Mainz, Germany. She is the author of Attention and Recombinance: A Cognitive-Semantic Investigation into Morphological Compositionality in English and co-author of Linking up Cognitive Systems in Language: Attention and Force Dynamics.

About the book

This book offers in-depth qualitative case studies of 70 acts of quoting verbatim performed by 16 U.S. speakers across a range of public settings. While their written versions unequivocally index the other voice via quotation marks, the video data drawn from the internet largely lack any non-verbal cues. Contrary to expectation, the quotations’ verbatimness is hardly ever translated into the gradient media: It neither stands out by vocal parameters (pauses, pitch, or intensity) when analyzed acoustically with Praat; nor are (manual) gestures, shift of gaze, or body posture called on to serve as regular discriminating quoting practices. In general, the other voice is effectively found backgrounded, if not suppressed, in its oral performance, unless explicitly introduced by a digital quotative.

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This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

Part I: Theoretical Foundations

1 Quoting Verbatim in Public Speech

2 Grounding Quotations

2.1 ‘Received’ Regards on Quotations in Writing

2.2 Zeroing in: Quoting in Speech

3 Framing Quotations

3.1 The Data Base and Principles of its Selection

3.2 Reconstructing the Causal Dynamics of Quoting

3.2.1 General Attention, Force Dynamics, and Gradience

3.2.2 Trigger, Target, and Concomitant

3.3 Advancing beyond the Verbal Repertoire

3.3.1 The Vocal Dimension

3.3.2 The Kinesic Dimension

3.4 Principles and Parameters of a Multimodal Analysis

Part II: The Case Studies

4 Verbalizing Quotation Marks: Quote and its Variants

4.1 Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein’s Report

4.2 Do Quotation Marks Really Matter?

4.3 An Academic Talk: Cognitive Psychologist Steven Pinker on Free Speech

4.4 Political Speeches: Barack Obama Announcing Another Voice

4.5 The ‘Political’ Noam Chomsky: Diversities in Quoting Verbatim ←7 | 8→

5 Quotation Marks across Media and Modalities

5.1 Quotation Marks in a Slide Show: Steven Pinker

5.2 A Quotation’s Medial History: A Basketball Score

5.3 ‘Doing’ Quotation Marks: John McCain, Steven Pinker, and Hillary Clinton

6 Versatile Say: From Reporting to Animating Another Voice

6.1 The Canonical Model in a Political Context: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Michelle Obama

6.2 ‘Launching’ Another Voice: Hillary Clinton

6.3 Re-enacting Voices: Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, and Oprah Winfrey

7 … and Back Again: Growing up – Be Like in Interviews

7.1 Miley Cyrus on The Tonight Show

7.2 Serena Williams at Two U.S. Open Press Conferences

7.3 Jake Clemons’ Testimony

7.4 Hillary Clinton – A Political Statement

8 Suppressing the Other Voice

8.1 Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Second and Third Inaugurals

8.2 John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural

8.3 Michelle Obama – A Recent Example

9 The Prevailing Hegemony of the Verbal Domain

References ←8 | 9→

Part I: Theoretical Foundations

←9 | 10→ ←10 | 11→

1 Quoting Verbatim in Public Speech

This book centers on the query of how speakers flag quotations as verbatim; or, to allude to the Bakhtinian notion of voice, how they convey to their audience that another voice is speaking.

For written language, the answer is (quite) straightforward: Quotation marks have long been conventionalized to delimit a segment of text at either end, to index that the extract enclosed in these non-alphabetical figural devices exactly reproduces an original. That is, the selected sequence is dissociated from its prior context and relocated to a novel linguistic environment, in fact ‘disrupting’ the current narrative, and such shift of voices is (expected to be) unequivocally acknowledged. Quotation marks, then, serve the exclusive function to draw readers’ attention to the text fragment they embrace and, at the same time, foreground its specific selection of morphemes in their particular sequence – irrespective of whether the citation is real, feigned, or imagined (cf. Ehmer 2011).

In spoken language, such unequivocal option is generally unavailable – even if, occasionally, speakers call on a manual gesture, ‘drawing’ quotation marks in the air, or frame a quotation with a verbal formula such as quote … end quote. Yet – and importantly so – no prescribed strategy exists for speech that would compensate for the paired figural elements to set two voices apart and still generate the same unambiguous and discriminative perceptual effect while crediting the other voice a comparable degree of salience.

In light of this state of affairs the present study inevitably invites a perspective that addresses, scrutinizes, and eventually accounts for all potential resources that speakers have at their disposal to signal the verbatimness of a quotation in the oral-aural-visual medium. To this end, authentic episodes of quoting will be inspected as to whether experienced native American speakers (in public), guided by their manuscripts, will functionalize non-verbal devices – and if so, which – to represent the quotation marks: the vocal dynamics of prosody, manifesting in pause patterns, pitch contours, and variations in intensity, as well as the repertoire of the various “utterance visible bodily actions” (Kendon 2004). In the course of this inquiry, I will specifically zero in on the medial transduction of another voice (in the sense of Kress 1997), closely examining acts of quoting verbatim at the interface of writing and speech in an array of spoken public settings. In essence, then, this book, conceived as a programmatic and explorative investigation, will outline a prospective – and quite comprehensive, it seems – agenda, subscribing to such an uncompromisingly multimodal approach to language use. In this intro←11 | 12→ ductory chapter, I will address in turn the various aspects and distinct dimensions relevant to the study of quoting verbatim in speech.

My study, then, positions itself at the interface of conversation analysis with its focus on the individual speaker and its turn toward ethnographic methodology; and it is, in its basic orientation toward qualitative microanalysis (cf. Bavelas et al. 2016) and case studies of individual speakers, especially sympathetic with a specific variant of third-wave sociolinguistics, Barbara Johnstone’s (2013) linguistics←12 | 13→ of particularity. And in line with this strand of research, I embrace the concern for authenticity of the linguistic material, ruling out any staged or elicited forms of spoken communication as a valid data base (see, in more detail, Chapter 3.1). Based on these initial assumptions and extending as well as elaborating on several previous small-scale studies on the multimodal implications of quotatives, my prime conceptual concern is now to more comprehensively probe into the underlying principle(s) of such multimodal integration, facing the notorious variability of quoting as an ultimately pervasive but essentially elusive concept in communication (see, for a recent and highly informative account, Finnegan 2011).