Abstract
This paper analyses the use of the discursive pattern ‘claim+ indirect quotation in quotation marks’ in journalistic discourse in French and Hebrew, purporting to contribute to the understanding of how reservations are conveyed through the combination of indirectness with explicitation and redundancy. This pattern is somewhat ambiguous as it feeds on two paradigms – quotations and ironic criticism – but its interpretation as conveying mild reservations is redundantly enhanced by the conventional implicature inherent in the quotative verb claim. An analysis of big corpora of newsfeeds in French and in Hebrew indicates that (a) the use of the redundant ‘claim +’ is significantly higher as compared with ‘say +’ in Hebrew than in French; (b) in both languages two explicitation strategies are used – stating rejection of the implied attitude without any reasoning, and quoting conflicting views without necessarily elaborating on them. It is argued that explicitation strategies are used to enhance preferred interpretations in both languages.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 131-141 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Journal of Pragmatics |
| Volume | 157 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2019 Elsevier B.V.
Funding
This paper has two aims. At the conceptual level, it purports to contribute to our understanding of how indirect reservations are conveyed through the complex combination of two paradigms - quotations on the one hand, and ironic criticism on the other. The pattern ‘claim + indirect speech in quotation marks’ represents this integration. From the perspective of cross-cultural pragmatic variation, it compares the use of this pattern in French and Hebrew online journalism, focusing on strategies used to explicitate the ambiguities inherent in the use of the above-mentioned pattern. The quotation pattern ‘claim + indirect speech in quotation marks’ is conceptualized as a form of metarepresentation which encompasses the echoic use of quotation marks in ironic utterances with no quotation, as well as other forms of quotations. In terms of its grammatical form it is identical to indirect speech. In terms of the use of quotation marks to embed the full reported utterance, it resembles direct speech, but it is also reminiscent of a different pattern whereby quotation marks are used to embed a part of the reported utterance within the grammatical structure of indirect speech. Consequently, through its use a tension is created between the commitment to the exact rendering of a mentioned utterance inherent in direct speech, the commitment to its content combined with a certain degree of stance taking conveyed by indirect speech, and possibly the judgmental reservations implicitly conveyed through indirect speech with partial quotations. As a result of this complexity, the function of ‘claim + indirect speech in quotation marks’ is arguably ambiguous in terms of the commitment to the form and content of the source as well as the expression of detachment. It is further argued that the nuance of distanciation and reservations is enhanced by the conventional implicature inherent in the quotative verb claim , and the ambiguity is thus reduced, though unresolved. Accordingly, the use of ‘claim + ’ is interpreted as a realization of redundancy, as compared with the use of ‘say + ’ . A quantitative corpus-based analysis comparing two big corpora of journalistic discourse in French and in Hebrew, each consisting of several millions of words, indicates that the use of the pattern ‘claim + ’ is significantly lower than the use of its counterpart, ‘say +’ both in French and in Hebrew, but the use of the redundant ‘claim + ’ is significantly higher in Hebrew than it is in French. This result partly confirms the findings of previous studies, which relied on much smaller data, and which indicated a tendency to avoid the use of ‘claim + ’ in French. Despite the partial disambiguation through the use of the quotative verb claim , a pragmatic micro-analysis of 100 occurrences of ‘ claim +’ in the French and Hebrew corpora indicates that in half the cases the attitudinal function of the pattern under study is explicitated in its co-textual environment. It was further found that both languages have recourse to two explicitation strategies: stating rejection of the implied attitude without any reasoning, and quoting conflicting view s without necessarily elaborating on them. It is argued that explicitation is a realization of redundancy: the very use of the pattern under study independently implies the journalist's reservations towards the metarepresented proposition, and explicitation only enhances potential interpretations that rely on the use of indirect speech combined with attitudinal quotation marks and with the conventional implicature inherent in the quotative claim in both languages. The quantitative and qualitative corpus-based analyses seem to encourage further research into the use of indirect reservations and redundancy in discourse. Elda Weizman is professor emerita at Bar Ilan University, Israel, where she is chair of Interdisciplinary Studies, and teaches cross-cultural pragmatics. Her research interests, anchored in socio-pragmatics, focus on indirectness in the new media in a cross-cultural perspective. She currently conducts with her colleague, Prof. Anita Fetzer, a large-scale research project, “The construction of ordinariness in mediated public talk: Accountability of communicative action and the private–public interface”, for which they have recently received a 3-year grant from the German-Israel Foundation (GIF). Additionally, she conducts a comparative corpus-based research on irony and reservations in on-line commenting and op-eds.
Keywords
- Explicitation
- Metarepresentation
- Quotations
- Redundancy
- Reservations