Reported Speech in Talking Race on Campus

Abstract

In talking race, university students sometimes report the speech of others, or themselves, to recreate what happened during an incident. Reported speech is used within narratives to vividly convey what was said, purportedly through the actor's own words or as evidence to support general claims. The speaker is not merely reporting speech but also assessing the problematic character of the actions perfrmed through others' w d s . Reported speech is r e l m t l y tied to assessment. Assessment ?weals the reporting speaker's positioning toward the reported speech. The reported speech used in talking race presents the other as ignorant, biased, racist, ridiculous, or honest. Afrzcan Americans discursively portray Whites as unwilling to admit racism, as stereotyping, mas duplicitous in intergroup relations. Whites, on the other hand,fmme Afrzcan Americans as exaggerating racism or as overemphasizing their ethnicity. Representing others' actions through invoking their words is a way of m'ticizing, challenging, or resisting such troublesome racialized events.

Talk About Books : A Study of Reading Groups

“…It is argued that much of the reported discourse found in reading group talk is found within passages of discourse where readers are offering assessments, which supports previous research that has identified this link between evaluations and reported discourse (e.g. Benwell, 2012;Buttny, 1997;Clift, 2007;CouperKuhlen, 2007;Myers, 1999a;Stokoe and Edwards, 2007). A second finding that is more unique to this data-set is that some instances of reported discourse demonstrate readers attempting to engage with the consciousness of a character, imagining their perspective through simulation.…”

“…Speakers can also use exaggerated prosody in order to undermine the credibility of the quoted speaker (Buttny, 1997). The quoting speaker may raise or lower the volume of their speech in the reported discourse relative to the surrounding talk, and speed up or slow down their speech in the reported utterance (Barnes and Moss 2007: 131;Holt 1996: 223).…”

A critical discourse analysis approach to news discourses and social practices on race in Brazil

“…What Buttny (1997) and Buttny and Williams (2000) suggest in their analysis of reported speech in focus groups discussing race can also be traced in another report, this time with a more positive assessment or positioning, though difficult again to attribute. The news is entitled Policiais militares são acusados de racismo contra garoto de 12 anos -PM teria ofendido menino negro em supermercado (Police officers are accused of racism against a 12 year old boy Police officers allegedly offended Black boy in a supermarket).…”

“…On the one hand, the collocation could have been used by the girl herself. On the other, it could be interpreted as assessment or positioning (Buttny, 1997;Buttny and Williams, 2000) of the newspaper which, I argue, underestimates the issue when framing the student s attitudes to racism as instructions in a recipe.…”

The Handbook of Narrative Analysis

“…She starts relating the second part of the complicating action in which the professor is confronted with his behavior and is forced to account for his racist remark in a relatively long reported exchange (Buttny 1997) consisting of sequences of direct reported speech, of which we see the first part here. Interestingly, the initiator of the confrontation is quite vague in the beginning, since Hafida deletes the subject and simply uses past participles instead of full verb forms ("gegaan," stepped, "gezegd," said, line 30), resulting in an ungrammatical and overtly agentless sentence that introduces the first direct quote.…”