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Article published In: Linguistic Recycling: The process of quoting in increasingly mediatized settings
Edited by Lauri Haapanen and Daniel Perrin
[AILA Review 33] 2020
► pp. 104–119

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Narrative analysis applied to text production

Investigating the processes of quoting in the making of a broadcast news story

 | University of Lausanne
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 7 October 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.00032.mer
Abstract
The following paper adopts the vantage point of a linguistic ethnographic approach to news production, focused on the process of quoting, and combined with narrative analysis. The starting point of the analysis is an account given by a person who lived through a dramatic event. The paper investigates how the processes of recontextualization affects the account during the making of a broadcast news story. It explains how and why news practitioners adjust stretches of talk to the news text they are producing, and it reveals to what extent a pre-existing version of what happened (that of the account) can be reshaped by one in the making (that of the news story in which the account is going to figure). In the case study, the processes of recontextualization relates to three narrative issues: (1) quoting involves adapting the account’s characters’ categorizations to those of the news story; (2) quoting entails choosing between different schemes of incidence that depict what happened slightly differently; (3) quoting asks for a delimitation of the account’s spatiotemporal parameters that corresponds with those of the news story. Such a narrative adjustment is neither a tightly planned nor an arbitrary process but is embedded in the professional practice as it unfolds in the social and material world.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Quoting in news settings, translation, and recontextualization
  • 2.Data: Documenting the journalists’ daily work in the newsroom
  • 3.Methods: The linguistic ethnography and narrative analysis of news production
  • 4.Analysis: An account in the making of a TV news story
    • 4.1Consistency through the homogenization of experience
    • 4.2Consistency by the weakening of the events’ sequencing
    • 4.3Consistency through the compression of time and place
  • 5.Conclusion: The scope and limits of narrative adjustment
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Merminod, Gilles
2023. Preparing for the deployment of ready-made stories in social interaction: reflexivity and narrative practices in professional communication. Multilingua 42:6 ► pp. 855 ff. DOI logo
Merminod, Gilles, F. Neveu, S. Prévost, A. Steuckardt, G. Bergounioux & B. Hamma
2022. La fabrication du récit médiatique : entre processus de mise en texte et idéologies langagières. SHS Web of Conferences 138 ► pp. 05004 ff. DOI logo

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