Ruth Finnegan is Visiting [{esearch Professor imd Emeritus Profl'Ssor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open Uni...
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Ruth Finnegan is Visiting [{esearch Professor imd Emeritus Profl'Ssor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open Uni versity. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996 ilnd iln Hon. Fellow of Somerville College Oxford in 1997; and was awarded an OBE for services to Sod.. 1 Sciences in 2000. Her publications include Lilllba Stories alld Slur}l-Telling 1967, 1981; Oral Literature in Africa, 1970; Mode:; of Thought (ioint ed.), 1973; Oral Poetry, 1977, 1992); lllfirrmation Technology: Sodallssues (joint ed.), 1987; Utl'racy alld Orality: Studies ill tile Tee/m%gy of Communicatioll, 1988; Tire Hidde/l MU$iciarl:;: Music-Making ill an E'lg/isll '7(!chl'S, heard them in cunversation. But I hild just come to accept this as pari of common practice, not anything 10 be really noticed, f'H less to .House parlicu lar curiosity. As I thought about it, I realised how little I knew about quoting and quotation. What does il mean, this strang" human propenSity to repeat chunks of lexl from elsewhere and 10 echo others' voices? How does it work and where did it come from? Does it matter? Why; anyway, do IV\' quote? I started by reflecting more can·fully on my own experience and was startled by how quoling permeated my world. And then I wondered how others were using. or not using, quotation both nearby and in far away times and places. On some aspects I found a vast and fascinatingliteratufe. ButtheI"C Sl'('med no Single accountlhat directly tackled my questions .lboul just what 'quotation' and 'quoting' were, how we had got to wheT'{' we now are, and how in practice these had been used ,md conceptualised. This led me to considering how people here and now actually use quotation (in practice, that is, not just according to the grammar books) and also, going on from that, whether wc might understand these present practices better by exploring something of their background and whether the problems currently c'lusing concern belong just to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or perhaps hading, all again shot through with quoted words and dialogues, nnd in some shops one or more of the many published collections of quotations. The local newspapers too swann with quotes and 'alleged' words from people they Cx)'
I thought I didn't quote much. My husband pointed out to me that in his opinion I was wrong
(33 year old primary school teacher, Yorkshire)'
Whill do people quote, and how? Where do they find their quotations? And \Vhill do th"y think about quoting? Since my own experience only goes so far, the next hvo chapters take a look at how some present-day people.ue engaging in quotation in the everyday life of here and now.
2.1. 'Here and now'? Not that 'here and now' is simple to pin down. Even in the most local of local settings people follow diverse ways, and, as we know well, local piltterns do not stand alone but interilct with others across the world and the generations. To add to the complexity, any population contains people of many .lges whose experiences and memories span many different timescalcs. But if there is no single 'here and now', it is still worth starting out not from a generalised invocation of 'Wh.lt we usually do', let alone grander terms like 'the normal practice', 'our contempOrilry assumptions' or 'ordinary people's experience', but from a specific time and place. So my intention here is to take a slice through people's practices in Britain today, 1 Mass Observer MO/BHI98 (for further inforrration se" follOWing section, also Appendices). 2 Mass Obs"r""r MO/W3816,
14
Why Do Wc Quote?
especially but not solely those in England. It is only a slice, a limited onc. But it follows the general spirit of the ethnographic studies of speaking and of writing which have led to so much insight by focussing on the actions of particular people at identifiable moments of time and place.' Here it can afford us a closer look at certain specific quoting practices of today before the more historical and comparative perspective of la\(>r chapters. The material comes partly (rom my own observations. I have lived in south-central England for many decades, interacting daily with people in the locality, reading local material, and undertilking research in Milton Keynes, the town where [ have long dwelt." As well as building on this background knowledge 1also carried out more systl'maticscruliny, reported in the following chapter. of how quotation marks were used in certain unpretentious local publications. My focus was I"ss on the prescriptions of grammilrians and other would-be gUilfdians of our language or on the conventions of academic writing so often taken as the nonn, as on the active practices of ordinary communicating. More important however have been the observations and reflections of others. Some of these have been gathered informally, some others come from a large·scale Oxford University p[('Ss online survey in 2oo6.~ But by filr the most extensive source for these two chapters lies in the focused commentaries on quoting and quotations written by some two hundred individuals in late 2006 and early 2007. The contributors werl' members of a semi-permanent panel of volunteer writers set up by the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex. Over many years these writers hilve been sending in rl'gular reports on their l'xperil'nces and observations, writing in free form in response to a series of looselyorganised queries known as .dire'cli vcs' (Fig. 2.1 illustrates the start of one return). I'redominilntly living in England, the insights and comml'nts of these reflective participant observers run through this volume and occupy the central place in Chapters 2 and 3. 6 3 On the ethnography of speaking and writing togetherwilh the general approach to m('thodology in this book see AppendiX I. 4 Apart from a few periods abroad my home has ~en in Milton Keynes since 1969 My ear!i('r research in th(' locality chiefly focuS"
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