Fairclough

Intertextuality and Assumptions
40
"But I am also going to link assumptions to intertextuality. I use the general term
'assumptions' to include types of implicitness which are generally distinguished in
the literature oflinguistic pragmatics (Blakemore 1992, Levinson 198 3, Verschueren
1999) as presuppositions, logical implications or entailments, and implicatures. My
main concern is with presuppositions, but I shall briefly discuss these distinctior:s
at the end of this chapter. Texts inevitably make assumptions. What is 'said' in a text
is 'said' against a background of what is 'unsaid', but taken as given. As with intertextuality,
assumptions connect one text to other texts, to the 'world of texts' as
one might put it. The difference between assumptions and intertextualitv is that the
former are not generally attributed or attributable to specific texts. It )is a matter
rather of a relation between this text and what has been said or ·written or thoup·ht
el~ew~1~re, _with the 'elsewhere' left vague."

40-41
Issues of "universality" and public spaces

41
Difference and dialogic
"Or to put it difierently,
the former accentuates the dialogicality of a text, the dialogue bet\\een the voice
of the author of a text and other voices, the latter diminishes it. The term 'voice'
is in part similar to the way I use the term 'style' (meaning ways of being or identities
in their and rnore broadly semiotic aspects), but it is useful in also allowing
us to focus on the co-presence in texts of the 'voices' of particular individuals
(Bakhtin 1981, Ivanic 1998, \Vcrtsch 1991 ). People differ in all sorts of ways, and
orientation to difference is fundamental to social interaction. Giddens suggested
in one of his earlier books that 'the procluction of interaction has three fundamental
elements: its constitution as "meaningful"; its constitution as a moral order; ancl its
constitution as the operation of relations of power' ( 199 3: 104). Orientation to
difference is central to the account of these three clements which he vvent on to give.
The of interaction as meaningful entails active and continual 'negotiation'
of differences of meaning; the 'norms' of interaction as a moral order are oriented
to and interpreted difierently by different social actors, and these diflerences are
negotiated."
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a. openness to difference
 (b) an accentuation of difference, conflict, polemic, a struggle over meaning, norms,
power;
(c) an attempt to resolve or overcome difference;
(d) a bracketing of difference, a focus on commonality, solidarity;
(e) consensus, a normalization and acceptance of differences of power which
brackets or suppresses differences of meaning and norms

" Orientation to difference brings into focus degrees and forms of dialogicality
in texts. What I am referring to here is an aspect oflBakhktin's 'dialogical' theory
or language: 'a discourse, language or culture undergoes "dialogization" when
it becomes relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same
things."
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Union example (1)
 Trade organization (4) - negotiated text
44-45
Game show  "public debate" is shaped (example 8)
 45
Hegemony
" In a Gram"scian \iC\v, politics is seen as a
for hegemony, a particular \vay of conceptualizing pm,er \\hich amongst other things
emphasizes how povver depends upon achieving consent or at least acquiescence
rather than just having the resources to use force, and the importance of ideology
in sustaining relations of power. The concept of has been
approached in terms of a version of discourse theory in the 'post -Marxist' political
theorv of Ernesto Laclau (Laclau and Mou1le 1985). The hegemonic struggle
betw~en political forces can be seen as partly a contention mer the claims of their
particular visions and representations of the world to having a universal status (Butler
et al. 2000).

"globalization" - example 4 NOT inevitable reminds me of what is happening with fracking
someone has an interest in this happening
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Most dialogical: Attribute, quote
Modalized assertion
Non-modalized assertion
Least dialogical: Assumption

"There is a repeated pattern here of denial followed by assertion negative clause
followed by clause. Denials imply the assertion' elsewhere' of what is being
denied in this case, that someone has asserted that there is too much globalization
in trade, and that the issue is how to stop globalization. In the context from
which this extract comes, Blair has been referring to pC'ople who 'protest against
globalization'. \Vhat he is implying is that these people clo assert or have asserted
these things but he is not actuallv attributing these assertions to them."
This is quite helpful in looking at environmental issues
49
-direct reporting
-indirect reporting
-free indirect reporting
-narrative report of speech act

50
beyond genre:
 "both local official
ones, representing respectively local government and business the Mayor, and the
Managing Director of the local entrepreneurs' centre. Other voices (e. g. representing
the cultural community, or inhabitants of the tmvn giving their experience of what
it's like to liYe there) might have been included but are not. It would seem that the
feature has been written on the basis of interview-s with the two officials. Some
information about the town is included in the author's account, some is attributed
to the officials, sometimes as direct report (quotation), sometimes as indirect report
(summary). Since it is likely that most of the information came from the inteniews,
one might >>onder vvhat dictates its distribution between authorial account, direct
report, and indirect report. The answer would seem to be: genre. This text
is 'mixed' in terms of genre, as I pointed out in chapter 2, but its intertextuality is
typical of press reports. The pattern is an alternation between authorial accounts
and indirect reports, backed up or substantiated with direct quotations. Even if, as
seems likely in this case, all the information about the town emanates from other
voices, the genre of press report favours this distribution of information between
the authorial voice and attributed voices.

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dialogism "lone parents"
survey "recontextualized" whoa..tricky...

recontextualization:
(a) the relationship between the report and the original (the event that is reported);
(b) the relationship between the report and the rest of the text in which it occurs
how the report figures in the text, what work the reporting does in the
text_

53
 BBC report - framing
 For example, the report that the Libyans 'said they wanted more time to sort out
the details of the handover' is framed with 'faced by the threat of more sanctions',
and one might see this framing as conducive to a rather negative interpretation of
vvhat the Libyan officials are reported to have said as, for instance, 'stalling' -indeed
the Correspondent does later hypothesize about 'a delaying tactic'.

55
We all work within assumptions
Existential assumptions: assumptions about what exists
Propositional assumptions: assumptions about what is or can be or will be the case
Value assump1:ions: assumptions about. what is good or desirable

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The ideological work of texts is connected to what I said earlier
about hegemony and universalization. Seeking hegemony is a matter of seeking to
universalize particular meanings in the service of achieving and maintaining
dominance, amlthis is ideological work. So for instance texts can be seen as doing
ideological vvork in assuming, taking as an unquestioned and unavoidable realitv the
factuality of a global economy (e. g. assuming the existence of a 'global ~'
in the sentence referred to in the discussion of hegemony: 'These are the students
with vvhom our yow1g people must compete for jobs and university places in a global
marketplace').