Linguistic recycling: The process of quoting in increasingly mediatized settings

Editors: Lauri Haapanen, University of Jyväskylä, & Daniel Perrin, Zurich University of Applied Sciences

The 2020 Issue of AILA Review will focus on practices of quoting. By quoting, we understand the discursive and translingual process of embedding extracts of formerly produced communicational offers in new, emerging communicational offers (Haapanen&Perrin, forth.), be it within or across domains and mediatized institutional settings.

Given its wide range of functions, the situated activity of quoting influences and is influenced by social structures from micro to macro levels and their interplay in human interaction. Thus, quoting and its linguistic result, the quotes, can be seen as rich points in the multimodal construction of society.

In practical terms, the analyses provided by the articles in this volume are meant to shed light on the interplay of domains, settings, and genres in, e.g., journalism and editorial conferences; law and court interrogations; politics and campaigning; academia and review processes; interpreting and doctor-patient-interaction.

We welcome original articles based on empirically-grounded analyses that focus on the (i) forms, (ii) functions, and/or (iii) processes of quoting in increasingly mediatized discourse and complex, dynamic contexts. By doing so, we expect the contributions to provide data-based answers to linguistically relevant questions such as:

i) What are the domain-specific conventions, forms, and characteristics to distinguish quoted language from its surrounding text?

ii) With what aim do language users attribute their words to someone else and alternate between various functions and their marking conventions, e.g., between direct [D] and indirect quoting [ID] in forensic interviews (Example 1)?

Ex. 1 (ID) Leif is asked how he knew that the company was for sale and (D) says “I know him.” Data from Byrman 2017

iii) How and why does the process of quoting unfold throughout intertextual chains in institutional and public discourse, across language users, workplaces, organizations, and domains?

In particular, we welcome papers that include analyses of the metadiscourse of quoting – discourse about the process of embedding others’ language. Practitioners’ concurrent or retrospective verbalizations of their quoting practices (as in Example 2, from journalism) can significantly add to our understanding of why quoting happens the way it does.

Ex. 2 A journalist commenting on her own quoting in a cue-based retrospective verbal protocol:

“I was kind of stunned myself when I realized that these [quotes] have been edited this much.” (Data from Haapanen 2017)

Finally, a majority of the contributions to the special issue are meant to explain changes in quoting practices related to contextual changes such the fast development of social media as well as increasing mobility, which can be regarded as global drivers of language recycling (Haapanen& Perrin 2018; Johansson forth.; Matsushita 2015; Puschmann 2015.)

Besides providing empirically sound analyses, all the authors of papers in the SI are expected to review and briefly discuss the general state of research on quoting in the chosen domain and research line. The introduction to the issue will propose an innovative framework to contextualize and systematize these research lines.

As a result, the 2020 AILA Review is meant to offer a systematic and multiperspective approach to a linguistic rich point: the omni-present and increasingly mediatized practice of recycling (and up-cycling) language across micro shifts of contextual change.

Roadmap

  • Deadline for 300-word abstracts: July 1st, 2018
  • Notification of acceptance: August 1st, 2018
  • Deadline for completed articles: June 1st, 2019 (max. 10,000 words; followed by peer-review)
  • Preliminary publication date: Spring 2020

Contact

Please e-mail your abstract to both the guest editors’ and the project accounts:

lauri.m.haapanen@jyu.fi

daniel.perrin@zhaw.ch

review_quoting@aila.info

References

Byrman, Ylva. 2017. Så fångas de misstänktas ord. Förhör och dokumentationspraktiker på Skattebrottsenheten. Gothenburg: Gothenburg University.

Haapanen, Lauri. 2017. Directly from interview to quotations? Quoting practices in written journalism. In R.

Laury, M. Etelämäki and E. Couper-Kuhlen (Eds), Combining clauses and actions in social interaction. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 201-239.

Haapanen, Lauri, & Perrin, Daniel. Forthcoming. Translingual Quoting in Journalism: Behind the Scenes of Swiss Television Newsrooms. In Lucile Davier ja Kyle Conway (Eds), Journalism and Translation in the Era of Convergence.

Haapanen, Lauri, & Perrin, Daniel. 2018. Media and quoting. In Colleen Cotter & Daniel Perrin (Eds), Handbook of language and media. London: Routledge.

Johansson, Marjut. Forthcoming. Tweets and videos as digital quotations in news texts. In P. Bou-Franch and P. Garcés-Conejos Blitivich (Eds), Analysing digital discourse: New insights and future directions. London: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Matsushita, Kayo. 2015. Risk Management in the Decision-Making Process of English-Japanese News Translation. Graduate School of Intercultural Communication, Rikkyo University.

Puschmann, Cornelius. 2015. The Form and Function of Quoting in Digital Media. Discourse, Context & Media 7, 28–36.