Who said that? Who wrote that? Reporting, Representation, and the Linguistics of Writing
Geoff M. Hall · 2005
Quotations appearing in newspaper stories tend to be at best rather inaccurate, at times completely imaginary or probabilistic, though important parameters impacting on the faithfulness of the representation are suggested by Short (1989), Short, Semino & Wynne (2002) and van Dijk (1988). Tannen (1989), Mayes (1990), Sternberg (1982) and others have proposed altogether abandoning the notion of ‘reported speech’ in favour of more ‘presentational’ pragmatic views of what is seen as primarily a rhetorical device. The investigation reported here is informed by this debate, including the comparative rarity of accurate reproduction as opposed to loose representation even in cases when technology would seem to have made more precise reporting easily possible. Testing the proposed ‘faithfulness parameters’ reveals that while Short et al. have undoubtedly given us a better nuanced picture than was once the case, their schema may still be premised upon too limited a model of communication. I conclude with wider reflections on the need for stylistics to develop and apply a better elaborated linguistics of writing.