Quoting as an evidential practice in Prime Minister's Question Time

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The proposed 4-month research stay at the Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, is intended to complete a chapter for my current Habilitation thesis project Constructing evidence in political interaction (working title). The general interest of this study is to examine how and to what ends participants (i.e. the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and backbench Members of Parliament) claim evidence during the question-answer sequences during Prime Minister's Question Time (PMQT) at the British House of Commons, making reference to their perceptual experience, prior speech, etc. and to make a theoretical contribution to the study of evidentiality in English. The methodology is informed by Interactional Linguistics, an interdisciplinary research programme grounded in Linguistics, Sociology and Anthropology, and by Rhetorical Structure Theory. The proposed project is concerned with the use of quotations, a base of knowledge widely documented in traditional, typological studies (e.g. Aikhenwald 2004). Quotations are treated as an interactional practice to construct the speaker's authority at PMQT. Specifically, the project will examine the linguistic structure of quotations with the verbum dicendi say (e.g. The Prime Minister is saying that) and their situated placement in turns and sequences. Along with these formal aspects it will describe functions of these types of quotations for the internal organization of turns (e.g. justification of requests for confirmation) and sequences and for the achievement of interactional and social functions (e.g. to challenge the claims of the Prime Minister and thus his credibility). The data base consists of a collection of ca. 600 instances of say, retrieved from 32 PMQT sessions between 2003-2011 (ca. 16 hours of video recordings). The proposed project will contribute to our understanding of quoting as an interactional practice in English, a language where evidentiality is optional, and to the theoretical discussion of evidentiality.