Direct Quote

8 Key excerpts on "Direct Quote"

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  ‹Speaking› Quotation Marks

  Toward a Multimodal Analysis of Quoting Verbatim in English

  • Martina Lampert(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  Instead, the grammars yield – perhaps with Biber et al. (1999) as a partial exception – a pre- or even proscriptive lan- 26 guage regard, leaning heavily toward the language ideology of (effectively written) standard language. Their definitions of direct reported speech (which, ironically, represents the current consensus linguistic term for quoting verbatim also in writing) are entirely in line with the model introduced above, apart from the fact that grammars tend to ritually emphasize an observation that, since Clark and Gerrig (1990), is – likewise ritually – voiced in linguistic expert accounts: namely that strictly verbatim quoting in speech is not possible just for memory capacity restrictions. Verbatimness as a distinctive property of quotations is thus only a “purported” attribute (Quirk et al. 1985:1021); they are in effect ‘constructed,’ since each quotation conveys its own stance that is critically different from that of the original source. By contrast, hardly any information on current practices of quoting in spoken language is found; and if some selected characteristics are mentioned at all, they are routinely compared with the conventions in (formal) writing – as when Quirk et al.

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  Understanding Quotation

  • Elke Brendel, Jörg Meibauer, Markus Steinbach(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  What role does context play in determining the meaning of quotation? 9. How are the different kinds of quotation acquired and processed? 2.1. Puzzle 1: Which kinds of quotation can be found across languages? In the philosophical and linguistic literature, the prototypical and most dis-cussed kind of quotation seems to be the direct quotation illustrated in (2). (2) Lena said yesterday in the museum of modern art: “This piece of art is difficult to understand.” In (2), the use of the quotation marks signals that the utterance “This piece of art is difficult to understand.” has been originally produced in a different context (i.e., yesterday in the museum of modern art) by a different speaker (i.e., Lena). Direct quotations are used to convey an utterance verbatim (with some flexibility, see section 2.4 below for more discussion). Since direct quo-tations are interpreted in the context of the original utterance, indexicals cannot be bound by the actual context. Moreover, direct quotations are referentially opaque and thus block substitution of extensionally equivalents salva veritate Exploring the Meaning of Quotation 3 (Oedipus said: “I love Iokaste.” / = Oedipus said: “I love my mother.”, for a more detailed discussion, see section 2.5 below). Indirect quotations (or indirect or reported speech/discourse) such as (3) are an alternative means to report an utterance that has been produced in a differ-ent context. Many languages have developed specific grammatical means to distinguish between direct and indirect quotations. English, for example, uses complementizers in sentence-initial position and sequence of tenses (see also section 2.3 below). (3) Lena said that this piece of art is difficult to understand. In indirect quotations, indexical expressions are usually interpreted in the actual context of utterance.

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  Translation and Relevance

  Cognition and Context

  • Ernst-August Gutt(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2

  2 Mossop (1987) uses the difference between direct and indirect speech quotations, in his terms “direct-discourse reports” versus “indirect-discourse reports” to differentiate “standard-form translation” from other, freer kinds of translation; for Mossop the essential similarity between “direct-discourse reports” and “standard-form translation” is that “standard-form written translations are like directly reported discourse as regards viewpoint’ (1987:9, italics as in original). He explains: “The meaning of the word ‘I’ in a translation is important, and in standard-form translation, ‘I’ is a stand-in for the source text narrator; ‘I’ is not the translator” (1987:18, italics as in original). Our relevance-theoretic account of direct translation naturally keeps the ‘viewpoint’ of the original and preserves other features in addition.

  One of the first issues to discuss here is, of course, what direct speech quotations are. It seems that the notion of direct speech quotation can be derived from the nature of stimuli used in communication; in relevance theory such stimuli are defined as follows:

  A stimulus is a phenomenon designed to achieve cognitive effects. (Sperber and Wilson 1986a :153)

  Now phenomena here are understood to be “perceptible objects or events” (Sperber and Wilson 1986a :40), and they achieve the desired cognitive effects in virtue of the properties they have.

  This means, then, that stimuli can be looked at from two different points of view. They can be looked at from the point of view of the cognitive effects they have — for example, what explicatures and/or implicatures they convey — but they can also be looked at from the point of view of the intrinsic properties they have as phenomena, and this is the perspective that seems to be relevant to direct quotation, for, as Wilson and Sperber (1988a)

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  Speech and Thought Representation in English

  A Cognitive-Functional Approach

  • Lieven Vandelanotte(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  As for non-fictional representations, there is the theoreti-cal problem of determining what ‘level’ of verbatimness is to be understood as ‘sufficient’ for something to ‘count as’ a Direct Quote. Clark and Gerrig (1990: 775) have drawn up a detailed list of different aspects of utterances which people could in principle ‘repeat’ when quoting someone’s actual utterance, including aspects of delivery (such as pitch, speech defects), language (including different dialectal and register features) and levels of linguistic acts (e.g. the mere propositional content vs. the illocutionary act). It is quite clear that rarely all of these aspects are reproduced in DST re-ported clauses; as Clark and Gerrig have argued, only nonincidental aspects get to be ‘depicted’ (1990: 777). For instance, in reporting what the Russian president has said on some topical issue, English-language newspapers will use English even though, conceivably, the president’s comments were uttered in Russian. For the purposes of news reporting, the language used in such a case is incidental. Even if one disregards incidental aspects, research has shown that verbatim recall of nonincidental aspects is both very hard to achieve and rarely required or relevant. As to the first, empirical memory research has shown conclusively that people have the greatest difficulty, even after just a few seconds, to recall an utterance precisely word for word (see, for in-stance, Sachs 1967, Jarvella 1971, Anderson 1974, Stafford and Daly 1984, Hjelmquist and Gidlund 1985a/1985b, Lehrer 1989). In addition, however much our daily discourses are fraught with ‘quotation’, it is only in specific institutional settings, such as academic writing and legal transcripts, that strict verbatimness requirements hold, typically with regard to written text.

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  Direct and Indirect Speech

  • Florian Coulmas(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Munro (1982) pointed out a variety of syntactic differen-ces between sentences containing inDirect Quotes and sentences contain-ing Direct Quotes in many languages, further strengthening our impres-sion of the different syntactic and semantic roles of the direct and inDirect Quote. Whereas the fact that Direct Quote and inDirect Quotes are different syntactically and semantically is incontrovertible, the nature of their differences may vary from language to language. In English, for Direct and indirect speech 35 example, aside from pronominalization and deictics discussed above, we can cite at least three syntactic differences between the direct and inDirect Quotes: (i) the complementizer, that, may occur with an inDirect Quote but not with a Direct Quote; (ii) the inDirect Quote but not the Direct Quote must bear the same tense as the verb of saying; (iii) there is an absence of an intonation break between a Direct Quote and the verb of saying, but not between an inDirect Quote and the verb of saying. On the other hand, the English verb, say, in its unstressed form, is often semantically bleached and displays the characteristics of a hearsay evidential. This hearsay evidential characteristic of say is especially prominent when the inDirect Quote is fronted as in (23): (23) He didn't want to play tennis, John said. If we contrast (23) with (24) containing a Direct Quote, (24) I don't want to play tennis, John said. we can observe that the differences between the syntactic-semantic roles of the Direct Quote and the inDirect Quote are minimal. Neither the Direct Quote of (24) nor the inDirect Quote of (23) seem to play the role of the direct object or patient of the verb of saying. Since the semantic function of say tends to lean in the direction of a hearsay evidential or an epistemic quantifier, the new information transmitted by sentences such as (23) and (24) rests in the quoted speech, whether it is direct or indirect.

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  Direct Speech, Self-presentation and Communities of Practice

  • Sofia Lampropoulou(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Traditionally, direct forms of speech presentation have been associated with faithfulness, in the sense of verbatim reproduction of the original utterance. This is because in most forms of speech presentation apart from DS the reported words (via the grammatical changes that take place) reflect the perspective of the reporter and therefore the addressee cannot be sure about the exact words that were originally uttered. Contrariwise, direct forms of speech (re)presentation involve a series of grammatical changes, and especially the shift in deixis, that reflect the perspective of the original speaker. Therefore direct forms seem to evoke the original voices and they thus carry implicit assumptions of faithfulness.

  However, the word-for-word reproduction of utterances is neither possible nor relevant in all types of context. In some written narrative genres, faithfulness matters and is crucially relevant. For example in writing and publishing contexts, the false reproduction of the original words in a posterior context is subject to negative criticism. What is more, in such contexts, the original/anterior words are easily accessible, since they consist of written publications and therefore the crosscheck of the relationship (in terms of accuracy) between anterior and posterior text is feasible. For this reason, the accurate reproduction of the authentic words is necessary and really matters in discourse genres where both anterior and posterior talk are in written forms and accessible, although it matters only if the false reproduction of the original words is subject to criticism. This observation applies for example to academic discourse contexts (see also Baynham and Slembrouck, 1999).

  If we consider other types of written genre, for example newspaper reporting, in which spoken language has to be converted to written language, the issue becomes more complicated. This is because some informal features of oral discourse have to be converted and/or adjusted to more formal features that are appropriate to written discourse, such as hedges, self-corrections, forms of address etc. As a result, Baynham and Slembrouck argue that the boundaries of speech representation marked by the use of quotation marks are illusory because they derive from the adaptation of oral speech to written language on the part of the reporter/editor (1999: 448). Furthermore, taking into account the lack of access to the original speech on the part of newspaper readers and the practices adopted for the conversion of spoken to written words, the issue of faithfulness becomes complex and multi-layered. If we finally consider the expectations of newspaper readers, namely that the average reader assumes faithfulness when reading the quotations included in a newspaper article, it can be concluded that the prominence of the issue of faithfulness (of speech representation) depends highly on the context under which it is considered. The perspective of both the producers of the original words, the readers of the newspaper as well as the reporters/editors have to be taken into consideration in order for a researcher/analyst to address all subtle nuances of faithfulness.

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  Quotation and Truth-Conditional Pragmatics

  • Xiaofei Wang(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Another way to sort out the various manifestations of quotation is pragmatic, contextual, or inference-based. In terms of the purpose a quotation normally serves, one can differentiate between pure quotation, direct quotation, and scare quote. Pure quotation is usually used to make a point about the orthographical, phonetical, and grammatical features of a linguistic sequence; direct quotation is used to report someone’s words, which is typically instantiated as a sentence; scare quote is used to distance the utterer herself from an expression that is usually attributed to someone other than the speaker. One example is that Gómez-Torrente (2003) distinguished pure quotations from impure ones by virtue of the quotation marks being used for referential purposes. Another is De Brabanter’s (2003) typology of quotation which is essentially interpreter-oriented.

  These two criteria have been widely adopted in literature. Theoretically speaking, all quotations can be characterized on both criteria. They weave together to define what a quotation is. This is observed by Semino and Short (2004) when they said, “Generally speaking, decisions in each individual case involve (i) formal and (ii) contextual and pragmatic criteria, but not necessarily in the same proportions” (p. 224). In practice, these two criteria can also be integrated in the categorization of quotation as well. This underlies Recanati’s typology of quotation, as I understand it. Recanati is a practitioner of this approach as he acknowledges a syntax-based criterion to distinguish open quotation from closed quotation; meanwhile, he also resorts to a semantic criterion to break hybrid quotations into cumulative and non-cumulative kinds. I will elucidate his view in detail below.

  5.3.2 Singular-term theses

  Recanati (2001b) classified quotations into closed and open types, depending on whether they are linguistically recruited as a singular term or not. This linguistic recruitment criterion is obviously a syntax-based one. It is further represented by an argument of what I call “the singular-term thesis 1,” which goes like this:

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  Literary Pragmatics (Routledge Revivals)

  • Roger D. Sell(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Halliday (1985 : 228ff.) to mention only two works of a generally high order.)

  Nor is poetics, which has investigated the field longest (starting from Plato) and on the whole best, an exception to the rule. Gérard Genette, for example, opposes the pure mimesis of directness, with its ‘literal fidelity’ and ‘documentary autonomy’, to the diegesis of indirectness: ‘It is, so to speak, acknowledged in advance that the narrator is not satisfied with transposing the words into subordinate clauses, but that he condenses them, integrates them into his own speech, and thus expresses them in his own style’ (Genette 1980 : 172).

  Despite the impressive ancestry and coalition behind it, however, this article of faith is nothing but a scholar’s myth, an ivory tower delusion. It has no leg to stand on either in logic or in culture or in reality, and what is more, nor in direct or indirect discourse. With regard to directness, I have traced the fallacy and suggested a counter-theory in a series of essays (Sternberg 1977 , 1978 , 1982a , 1982b ). To put the thing in a nutshell, the direct form cannot reproduce even where it (or we) would, because a number of original objects and aspects are unreproducible: from the context of utterance through the turns of thought to the intonation of speech. Nor would it be reasonable to expect the reproduction of objects that do not, may not, or will not exist, as in modalized direct quotation: prospective (‘I will tell him: “…”’), imperative (‘Tell him: “…”’), hypothetical (‘If I tell/told/had told him: “…”’), etc. Again, discourse provides an entire set of anti-reproductive licenses and conventions, such as translational mimesis, whereby Midianites (for example) speak pure Biblical Hebrew, or interpretative paraphrase within quotes, or even intersemiotic transfer from non-verbal to verbal expression (‘His eyes said: “Thanks”’). And life makes its own laws and loopholes, notably the faults of memory. Under such pressures from all quarters, there is no way to maintain the bond between direct quotation and literal representation. Positively speaking, it turns out that: (1) the direct form is potentially the best reproducer within a system not much concerned with reproduction per se

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