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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. 176–203

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Visuo-material performances

'Literalized’ quotations in prime minister’s questions

 | University of Würzburg
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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.00036.reb
Abstract
Drawn from a larger project on reported speech in parliamentary interaction (Reber, E. (Forthcoming). Quoting in parliamentary question time. Exploring recent change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.), this paper studies visuo-material performances of so-called “literalized” (Rumsey, A. (1992). Wording, meaning, and linguistic ideology. American Anthropologist, 921, 346–361. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) quoting, i.e., verbatim reproductions of original utterances. Taking an interactional-linguistic perspective, I analyze how participants accomplish ‘literalized’ reported speech through vocal, verbal, and visual cues, recruiting their material documents. The data are culled from video recordings of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), a parliamentary session where the Prime Minister (PM) takes questions from the Leader of the Opposition (LO) and Members of Parliament (MPs) at the British House of Commons. I place my focus on cases where speakers use original documents as visual aids, a classic rhetoric device of persuasion, and show how paper documents are constituted, celebrated, and rhetorically enacted as (seemingly) original documents in embodied, situated ways. As a conclusion, I argue that the display of original documents allows the speaker to make claims of having not only evidential but also experiential access to their sources, a practice that underpins their evidential authority.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Quotation and authorship in political discourse
    • 2.2Quotation, embodiment, and visual aids
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1The visuo-material performance of ‘literalized’ quotations
    • 4.2An original document as a resource for ridicule of the political opponent
    • 4.3The constitution of a single cover page as an entire report
    • 4.4The enactment of selected text chunks for rhetorical effect
  • 5.Summary and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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