9. What Is Quotation and Why Do We Do It?

Our speech, that is, all our utterances [are] filled with others’ words(M. M. Bakhtin) The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved byquotation(Benjamin Disraeli) Our glances at quoting in other times and places throw a sharper light on the contemporary quoting patterns with which we started. Though they are by no means uniform across all participants and situations, some of the specificities of that ’here and now’ of quoting in twenty-first century England are now cle..