Self-Quotations

Il confronto fra eventi diversi serve a configurare la dimensione culturale del progettista meglio di quanto consenta l'opera singola. In questo caso i progetti non si riferiscono alla pura ricerca, ma ad occasioni concrete o che hanno mancato per poco l'esito finale.

This chapter aims to explore the role of the self-quotations in Isocrates’ Antidosis in connection to the fictitious judicial framework of the speech. Pretending to defend himself in a trial for a charge of corrupting youth through his own teaching, Isocrates produces written evidence that consists of large extracts from his previous works. A clerk was also asked to read out these passages, thus turning the imaginary court into a place for a public reading. By introducing and commenting on this “auto-anthology”, Isocrates offered an authorised interpretation of his writings; at the same time, however, these pieces of evidence - together with the silent witnesses produced by his pupils - proved functional both to the rehabilitation of the author’s reputation in the polis and to the transformation of traditional rhetorical forms into new literary products.

The article discusses self-quotations as a strategy of politeness. I maintain
that self-quotations fulfill strategies of linguistic politeness, and that the
fulfillment of these strategies must be understood through the discourse event
standing in the background of the self-quotation. In the corpus – 13 Hebrew
articles written by women in eastern Europe in the nineteenth century – 35 self quotations
were found. All of them are “fictional”, i.e. they do not refer to an
actual discourse event that occurred in the past. Nevertheless, the fictionality is
not identical in all the cases examined, and it arises from the specific characteristics
of each case. The examination of the construction of the other discourse
event (past, future, or fictional) reveals that it strongly influences the quotation’s
pragmatic function, and specifically its “polite” character. The discourse event
might be a speech or thought event; it might actually have occurred in the past or
only be implied by a future tense or a conditional structure; or sometimes it may
be openly declared as a discourse event that will not take place altogether. Self quotations
function as hedging devices, qualifying various aspects of the utterance
– its illocutionary force, comprehensiveness, the degree of social authority it
expresses, or the act of uttering itself.
Keywords: self-quotations, politeness, discourse event, pseudo-quotations,
reported speech, Hskalah