Mobilizing knowledge

Abstract

Many linguistic studies have analyzed the ways in which reported speech is used to mobilize knowledge in academic writing, but there have been far fewer such studies of knowledge mobilization in non-academic genres. This study analyzes the functions of reported speech in a Canadian quasi-judicial public inquiry report, a genre that is intertextually situated between research genres (through academic expert witnesses) and policy genres (through its role in making policy recommendations to the government). All instances of explicitly marked citation and reported speech in the commission report were identified and coded by function. The findings show citation and reported speech had specific functions that contributed to knowledge mobilization by discursively creating evidence, transporting worldviews and values, and changing knowledge status in the legal genres. The analysis also raises theoretical questions in linguistics, resulting in the argument that reported speech is not a static, formal category but a discursive status negotiated by the participants.