Reported speech and intertextuality 2

As I mentioned in the post below, I would like to briefly comment on Greg Matoesian's paper on reported speech in a court room context. Matoesian discusses the use of audiotaped statements made by a witness for the prosecution as well as by the victim herself during the actual trial. He argues that the defense attorney recontextualised the previously recorded statements by playing them in the court room, thus reframing the original utterance and influencing the perception of said utterances by the jury and the judge.

For my research, certainly the most relevant aspect of Matoesian's paper is the act of de- and recontextualisation as such. In my source material, missionaries frequently use Bible quotations for various purposes, for example, particularly in the case of African missionaries, to show their allegiance to Christianity as the religion of the book and establish the place in the Christian tradition. Also, and this is true for Europeans and Africans alike, the missionaries derived solace from the Biblical text in times of spiritual or physical distress. Lastly, this use of Bible passages identified the agents as proficient Christian theologians, emphasising the fact that despite the physical distance, they are members of the same religious community as those who read their letters and journals back in Europe and share a common repertoire of texts and imagery. By quoting from the Bible, they decontextualise the Biblical passage from its original context and recontextualising it to apply to their own situation. They thereby describe their present situation by means of past discourse, thus writing themselves into the reception history of the Biblical text. They also create a new interpretative frame for the Biblical passage in question, forging an bilateral intextual bond which affects not only their own writing but also the original Bible text.

On page 882 of his paper, Matoesian remarks that reported speech "...bestows an aura of objectivity, authority, and persuasiveness to the current moment of speech". By employing someone else's words instead of our own -- in the case of the Kennedy Smith rape trial, the defense attorney used the witnesses' own statements against them instead of arguing in his own words --, we distance ourselves from what is being said, presenting the reported utterance as an objective statement supporting our own argument. In the case of the missionaries' correspondence, Bible passages are frequently used to point to a precedence for the missionaries' current situation. An utterance taken from the text of ultimate authority in a Christian context explains or justifies, for example, a setback in the missionary enterprise, showing that the agents are part of a long tradition of spreading the word, despite the temporary difficulties.

Together with Clift's paper on "Indexing stance: Reported speech as an interactional evidential.", which I discussed below, Matoesian's work is going to inform my writing on the intertextual bonds in my source material formed by reported conversations with locals and the frequent use of Biblical quotations, contributing to the interdisciplinary approach to a critical analysis of 19th century missionary correspondence.

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Source: Matoesian, G. (2000): "Intertextual authority in reported speech: Production media in the Kennedy Smith rape trial." Journal of Pragmatics 32, 879-914.