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Article published In: Internet Pragmatics
Vol. 8:1 (2025) ► pp.1–31

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

Quotations in political speeches and user comments

 | University of Augsburg
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

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

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Augsburg.

Published online: 13 May 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00109.fet
Abstract
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.
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
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Fetzer, Anita
2026. Quotation headlines in the printed British quality press. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 36:1 ► pp. 63 ff. DOI logo
Andone, Corina & Menno H. Reijven
2024. Quoting as an Argumentative Strategy in Dutch Televised Election Debates. In Not My Words [The Language of Politics, ], ► pp. 137 ff. DOI logo

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