Abstract

"And I Quote": Direct and Indirect Point-of-View Switches in Clusivity-Oriented Discourse The aim of this paper is to approach the notion of speech/thought representation from a pragma-cognitive perspective. The use of direct and indirect representation in political discourse allows the speaker to construe the speech situation from a perspective other than her/his own. The speaker normally occupies the focal position in relation to other discourse entities in a particular speech situation, and thus presents discourse events from her/his point of view, however, on some occasions she/he allows other "voices." It is the distinction between the Speaker and the Sayer that provides means of capturing the phenomenon in question: the Speaker construes the actual/present speech situation presenting events from her/his own perspective, while in the represented speech situation the Speaker represents the words of the Sayer, i.e. the original speaker of the represented speech situation. Assuming the existence of the Sayer's consciousness separate from the Speaker's consciousness, it is clear that the Sayer's perspective is independent of the Speaker's perspective. The Speaker may employ a series of shifts occurring in spatio-temporal and axiological dimensions of the actual speech situation leading either to a full switch or to an apparent switch to the Sayer's perspective. In both cases, the distance between the Speaker and a particular discourse entity may be reduced or increased to indicate its inclusionary or exclusionary status, as well as to include the entity in or exclude it from the "us" group. The data analysed and samples used for illustrative purposes have been selected from a corpus of 35 speeches delivered by Barack Obama between 10th February 2007, i.e. the announcement of his candidacy for the presidency of the USA, and 4th November 2008, i.e. the day of the election. The transcripts of the speeches have been downloaded from the official Obama's website "Organizing for America".