Truan, Naomi

English

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Review of: Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz &
Monika Kirner-Ludwig (eds.) (2015), The Pragmatics of
Quoting Now and Then
Naomi Truan
To cite this version:
Naomi Truan. Review of: Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz & Monika Kirner-Ludwig (eds.) (2015),
The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then. 2018, pp.592-594. ￿halshs-01734565v2￿
592 Discourse & Society 29(5) 
are co-produced. Additionally, it reinforces the powerful descriptive and explanatory 
capacities of EM, CA and MCA when considering early childhood educational practices. 
In keeping with its stated aim, the book is valuable for students and scholars of various 
disciplines, such as EM, CA, discourse analysis and sociology, as well as appealing to 
early childhood teachers, researchers and policy makers.
Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz and Monika Kirner-Ludwig (eds), The Pragmatics of Quoting 
Now and Then, Berlin and Boston, MA: Mouton de Gruyter, 2015; viii + 428 pp., €119.95/
US$168.00/£89.99 (ebook, hbk).
Reviewed by: Naomi Truan, Department of German Linguistics, Université Paris-Sorbonne, France 
and Department of English Linguistics, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
No discourse is really new: everything we say or write integrates words or expressions 
that have already been used by others and have circulated among speakers. The ubiquity 
of quoting is one of the key points of The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, which 
presents 16 original contributions to pragmatics through the lens of quoting as ‘an act of 
taking up text and, in doing so performing a shift of context, focus and perspective’ (p. 
2). Each chapter relies implicitly or explicitly on the introductory distinction between the 
act of quoting, its products (quotations or quotes) and its indicators (quotatives). The 
identification of the quoters – the speakers who produce quotations or quotes – also 
constitutes an important dimension.
Whereas most contributions are devoted to quotations or quotes as traces of so-called 
reported speech (which actually does not report anyone’s words, but constructs them 
through the incorporation into the speaker’s perspective), the act of quoting is less easy 
to grasp: for instance, it may not be identified as such by the addressee, and speakers 
themselves might not be aware of referring to prior discourse. Between these two 
extremes, it is also possible for the speaker to mark their speech as ‘reported’, but for the 
addressee to misunderstand the context from which the quotation is drawn. This context 
shift is an essential property of quoting: an element of a prior Context A is incorporated 
into a new Context B. Quotative markers – typographic ones such as quotation marks 
and italics, verbal ones such as ‘say’, or prosodic and gestural ones – are usually employed 
to clearly indicate the quoted segments; they help make an utterance recognisable as a 
quotation and to draw the addressee’s attention to the disruption of speech that quota-
tions represent, though they are never obligatory.
The book comprises 16 chapters divided into two parts plus an introduction. Part I, 
‘Quoting Now’, is devoted to contemporary quoting practices, including five chapters on 
computer-mediated communication, two focusing on specific German quoting expres-
sions and one on quoting practices in academic settings. Part II, ‘Quoting Then’, concen-
trates on diachronic analyses and historic corpora without losing touch with modernity, 
since two articles compare old texts with modern ones. The diachronic overview sheds 
light on how surprisingly similar quoting functions can be across space and time, and in 
fact similar investigations are often pursued in Part I as well, since they offer valuable 
insight into discourse variation or continuity.
Book reviews 593
All contributions are corpus based, but they range in scale and scope from small cor-
pora produced by the researcher for specific research purposes (Landert, Arendholz, 
Finkbeiner, to name just a few) to complex specialised corpora of professional discourse 
(Johnson) and large reference corpora such as the Corpus of Historical American English 
(Moore), and several adopt contrastive approaches. A common thread running across 
these different materials and genres concerns how speakers position themselves regard-
ing other interactants. Throughout the contributions, two main functions of quotations 
are investigated: enhancing the speaker’s credibility and establishing new relationships.
Quoting is extensively used as a stance-taking strategy to contribute to the speaker’s 
credibility in various genres. Landert (Chapter 1) shows how journalists writing for UK 
newspapers draw upon other voices to help make news into reportable facts, since state-
ments can be traced back to the original source. Similarly, Fetzer and Reber (Chapter 4) 
discuss how quotations in political interviews are used strategically to enable speakers to 
position themselves towards the source of quotation. In German newspapers on com-
memorations (Musolff, Chapter 5), quotations also reinforce the speaker’s credibility by 
drawing from well-known sources to provide an argument from authority. The central 
notions of authorship, intertextuality and transmission are often the object of explicit 
reflection, since attributing a quote to a source is never a neutral act, despite what jour-
nalists or politicians might pretend.
Second, quoting serves creating and maintaining new relationships with other inter-
actants: a correctly recognised quotation helps establish a community of practice between 
speaker and addressee. In Chapter 7 on square quotes, Meibauer shows how quotation 
marks enable the speaker to distance himself or herself from the quoted segment. Modern 
and medieval scholars alike use quotations for this kind of relational work. In academic 
journals (Schneider, Chapter 8), quoting becomes a positioning strategy to present one-
self with a positive professional image. Similar findings can be found in Lindner’s 
Chapter 16 on German medical case reports from the 17th and 18th centuries, where 
quoting serves self-praising and self-promoting goals, though quoting was not at that 
time a formal part of academic standards. Medieval authors already used quoting as a 
legitimisation strategy to embrace the spirit and tradition of other writers (Kirner-Ludwig 
and Zimmermann, Chapter 12). In court (Johnson, Chapter 15), quoting serves both the 
prosecution and the defence, whether to plead guilty or inability to commit a crime. 
Finally, quoting also represents a tool widely used for face-saving strategies. Chapters 2 
and 3 (by Arendholz and Bös and Kleinke, respectively) show how quoting in message 
board communication or in online discussion forums serves interpersonal functions, 
driving the online community to respond with ad hominem evaluations or positive 
alignment.
Apart from the discursive functions of the aforementioned quotations, several papers, in 
particular based on historical corpora, address other issues related to quotes, such as spe-
cific constructions (Finkbeiner’s Chapter 6 on the German formula ‘X ist gut’), grammati-
calisation processes (Aijmer’s Chapter 9 on lexical markers of quotation between 1560 and 
1760), etymological issues (the verb quoth and quote in Middle English in Chapter 10 by 
Moore, and the terms quotation, citation and reference in Kirner-Ludwig and Zimmermann’s 
Chapter 12), pragmatic markers in direct speech passages (Lutzky, Chapter 14) or the link 
between Latin citations and the Vercelli Homilies (Chapter 11 by Rudolf).
594 Discourse & Society 29(5) 
Despite the heterogeneity quoting functions analysed, the volume fulfils its role: 
investigating the forms and functions of quoting from the Middle Ages up to the present 
day. The variety of the corpora surprisingly shows a significant continuity: as I said, 
quoting is everywhere.
Rebecca Piekkari, Denice E Welch and Lawrence S Welch, Language in International Business: The 
Multilingual Reality of Global Business Expansion, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2014; 272 pp., €80.00/
US$125.00 (hbk).
Reviewed by: Lin Yuting, Department of English, City University of Hong Kong, People’s Republic of 
China
The advent of globalization has brought a growing interest in discourse and communica-
tion in multilingual and multicultural business settings. This book contributes to this 
scholarship by delving into what goes on inside international firms to reveal the multi-
faceted role language plays in global business expansion. From a perspective that inte-
grates multilingualism, translation studies, international business and management 
studies, the authors illustrate how language use influences the process of communica-
tion, reconfigures organizational structure, shapes power relationships between people 
and groups, and how individuals and organizations respond to challenges presented by a 
multilingual business environment.
The authors start by challenging the assumption that the rise of English as a busi-
ness lingua franca has made language a less critical issue for managing international 
organizations. Chapter 1 amply demonstrates that globalization does not make the 
world of business monolingual, but rather exposes companies to a wider array of lan-
guages. The remainder of the book focuses on the far-reaching implications of this 
multilingual reality.
Chapter 2 considers the subject of translation in international business, describing 
from an insider perspective the ways in which multilingual texts are produced in organi-
zational settings. Translation processes may be influenced by a number of situational 
factors, including cost, criticality and concerns about timeliness, accuracy and informa-
tion security. In Chapter 3, the authors outline employee and managerial reactions to the 
language challenges they confront. A typical action firms may take as they move into a 
diverse language environment is to adopt a ‘common corporate language’ (CCL) – for 
example, English – to facilitate organizational communication. Employees, however, 
may respond to this policy in various manners, such as passively ignoring or even 
actively evading the use of the CCL.
Chapters 4–8 explore in further detail the effects language may have on various 
aspects of international business. It is suggested that language is not only a vehicle for 
information transfer, but a ‘reconfiguration agent’ (p. 88) with the potential to change 
organizational structure and shape power relations between groups and individuals. In 
Chapter 4, the authors demonstrate that language affects the internal functioning of a 
multinational organization, in that subsidiaries sharing a common mother tongue are 
likely to interact more between themselves, becoming what are referred to as ‘language 


Review of: Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz & Monika Kirner-Ludwig (eds.) (2015), The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then

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Review of: Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz & Monika Kirner-Ludwig (eds.) (2015), The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then

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