Affiliation:
1. University of Augsburg
Abstract
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.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company