TIPA. Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage (Jan 2017)
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Abstract
How does reported speech discursively construct an image of the other in contemporary political discourse in France, Great Britain and Germany? After having long been neglected (Nay, 2003a, 2003b), parliamentary studies have come in recent years to generate a renewed interest (Burkhardt & Pape, 2000; Burkhardt, 2003; Bayley, 2004; Ilie, 2006, 2010a; Ionescu-Ruxandoiu, Roibu & Constantinescu, 2012). Due to due to their publicity and accessibility, parliamentary debates contribute to highly ritualised and theatrical representations of conflict in politics.Whereas research on enunciative heterogeneity (Authier-Revuz, 1982, 1984) is numerous in the French-speaking area, it remains a relatively limited field of research in the Anglo-Saxon and German traditions of discourse analysis. Relying on the distinction made by Authier-Revuz (1982, 1984) between constitutive heterogeneity, inherited from Bakthinian dialogism, and shown heterogeneity defined as the forms which offer a representation of the discourse of the other(s), this article focuses on markers of shown heterogeneity in a corpus of parliamentary debates on Europe between 1998 and 2015 in France, Germany and Great Britain. European discourse in national parliamentsEven though the representation of the other’s words seems to be an essential part of political discourse, most of the studies on reported speeches focus on two or three speakers (Vincent & Turbide, 2005; Sandré, 2009, 2012; Wieczorek, 2010) or on a particular debate (Micheli, 2005, 2007), while contrastive research remains extremely rare (Schröter, 2013: 91).The corpus consists of national plenary debates between 1998 and 2015 held ex ante or ex post European Councils at the Assemblée nationale, the Bundestag or the House of Commons, respectively. The corpus has been annotated according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative and enables a precise retrieval of the following metadata: speaker, sex, political party, political affiliation, constituency, opposition or majority member. Addressees and target recipients of political discourseFollowing Ducrot et al. (1980b), I make a distinction between addressees (allocutaires) and target recipients (destinataires) of the speech. Whereas addressees are linguistically prototypically encoded by terms of address, imperative forms and second person pronouns, target recipients are the ones actually addressed based on the propositional content of the utterance and its illocutionary force. Both are discursive roles and should be distinguished from the real persons (hearers or auditeurs), as the speaker (locuteur) is not equivalent to the speaking subject (sujet parlant). In most cases of everyday conversations, addressee and target recipient correspond with each other. Nonetheless, in parliamentary encounters, an utterance can be formally addressed to a colleague and actually intended to other colleagues (as well) and/or to a broader audience. Reported speech as representations of the other constitutively contributes to this “double address” (Amossy, 2002). As Tannen notes, the so-called reported speech, which is actually constructed discourse, “expresses the relationship not between the quoted party and the topic of talk but rather the quoting party and the audience to whom the quotation is delivered” (1989: 109; quoted by Torck, 1994: 21). The enunciative source of the quoted segment constitutes a defining criterion for a typology of occurrences. The first part of the paper is devoted to official or renowned enunciators, whereas the second part investigates occurrences where the enunciators are collective, generic and underspecified. Taking the other into consideration: Collective Enunciators and Counter-ArgumentationAt the House of Commons, parliamentary debates on Europe often depict a high degree of technicity. In this context, citations of European Commission’s reports serve an apparently dispassionate and objective purpose, even though further analysis actually shows how they reveal and redistribute power relations. On the other hand, at the German Bundestag, controversies typically revolve around the language of the quotation (English or German) – a specificity of debates on Europe involving external sources like the European Commission. Nevertheless, national plenary sessions on Europe also present similarities regarding the enunciative sources: in France and Germany, politicians from all parties mention the same famous people in the world of European politics. Although one might have thought these individuals are not controversial, quotations are at the heart of intense conflicts about the legitimacy to quote one or another. Rather than the actual content of the reported speech, the legitimacy of the quoted person becomes the real hurdle. Understanding the Other: On the Multiplicity of Voices in the Public SphereAnother well-developed strategy is the mobilisation of collective, generic and underspecified enunciative sources, mostly relying on the citizens’ voice. In these cases, the reported speech mostly consists of a dialogue between the politician and the constituents. The quoted “Mr or Mrs Everybody” personify the common sense the politician endorses in the name of his or her constituents, and potentially, voters. Conclusion: Displaying the Political OtherMarkers of enunciative heterogeneity are a fruitful resource during parliamentary plenary sessions because they enable to depict a portrait of the other while reaffirming the speaker’s position. Two main categories of enunciators have been identified, which correspond to two central argumentative patterns. The analysis first showed how so-called reported speech incorporates other discourses, especially in the case of parliamentary debates on Europe, which have to refer to official sources from the European Union as an authority source. The corpus exhibited a difference between Great Britain on the one hand, and Germany and France on the other hand: whereas the mention of EU sources remains technical at the House of Commons, the Bundestag and the Assemblée national flourish with allusions and quotations to historical figures of the European integration. Moreover, displaying the others words enables to sketch alternatives or opposing views. While fictively giving a voice to target recipients (destinataires) of parliamentary debates, which are often not the explicit addressees (allocutaires), MPs stage one essential component of modern parliamentary democracies: the presence of “present-absent target recipients” (Amossy, 2002), who cannot respond during the interaction, but still largely influences public political discourse. One of the core findings of this paper lies in the diachronic and contrastive analysis of quoting practices in three national parliaments between 1998 and 2015. The corpus indicates that MPs are very conscious about quoting conventions and habits in their respective communities. This reflexive awareness might be typical for parliamentary debates on Europe, as Antje Vollmer (BÜNDNIS 90/DIE GRÜNEN) [majority] says: “One sees that the fondness for quotations on Europe is huge (DE 2002.12.19)”.
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