14

Had Enough of Experts

Intersubjectivity and the Quoted Voice
inMicroblogging

Michele Zappavigna

Introduction
Public comment on political issues via social media platforms such as Twitter and
Facebook has become a commonplace social practice (Highfield, 2016). This kind
of discourse often involves referencing the views of politicians and public figures,
particularly opinions that have been expressed in the media via interviews or off-
hand comments made in other public forums. These references are typically made
by directly or indirectly quoting short snippets of secondary material. They are
one important way in which a voice other than that of the primary social media
user can be incorporated into a social media post. In the case of political issues
that have generated a lot of public interest, such forms of quotation can proliferate
rapidly through an online social network, resulting in rearticulation and recontex-
tualisation that is particularly interesting when approached from the perspective of
Bakhtins (1986, p.89) notion of heteroglossia and its core idea that all our utter-
ances ... [are] filled with others words, varying degrees of otherness and varying
degrees of our-own-ness (Bakhtin, 1986, p.89).
Linguistic studies of quotation practices are associated with work on attribu-
tion, evidentiality, and epistemological positioning (Bednarek, 2006), and broader
research into stance, subjectivity, and intertextuality. Intertextual meanings are par-
ticularly important in social media environments given the tendency of images,
video, and written text to be replicated, modified, and recontextualised at rapid
rates and high volume. This has led to the metaphor of viral distribution being
used to characterize such proliferation (Hansen, Arvidsson, Nielsen, Colleoni,&
Etter, 2011). How texts produced with spreadable media (Jenkins, Ford, &
Green, 2013) are shared across networks has been of particular interest to quantita-
tive studies on information diffusion, concerned with how topics proliferate on
social networking services, as well as in professional domains such as marketing.

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 322Zappavigna

The information diffusion approach has, however, due to the difficulties of auto-
mating linguistic analysis of large datasets, tended to background dimensions of
communication such as how (shared) meaning, values, and norms (Rieder, 2012,
p.1) are construed in texts.
Quoting practices in new media discourses tend to blend established print
culture practices, such as conventionalized typographic representations, (e.g., sur-
face features (Fairclough, 1992) such as quotation marks) with the affordances of
new technologies (Puschmann, 2015). The brevity imposed by the microblogging
format (140 characters per post) means that tweets offer interesting insight into
how Twitter, as a semiotic technology and a form of new writing (van Leeuwen,
2008), condenses the play of textual voices in posts. These affordances mean that
tweets can incorporate embedded dialogism (Han, 2015, p.64), where multiple
voices are abridged and evaluated in a highly condensed manner. Linguistic stud-
ies of attribution in relation to social media are still in their infancy, and work
has tended to focus on the role of features such as the use of the @ symbol
(e.g., @michaelgove) in relation to forms of address (Honeycutt & Herring, 2009)
rather than the sourcing of stances. Puschmann (2015) has explored retweeting as
a form of quotation, suggesting that quotation has expanded its role, emphasizing
phatic and sociocommunicative aspects in addition to argumentative and informa-
tional needs within new media communication (Puschmann, 2015, p.36). The
aim of this chapter is to investigate the range of linguistic and multimodal choices
involved in construing quoted voices in microblogging, using Twitter discourse
about expertise at the time that the British referendum on leaving the European
Union was a popular topic on Twitter. It also aims to explore the social semiotic
function of quotation in social media environments with a view to augmenting
existing accounts of quotation that have been based on written texts and have not
considered how the multimodal affordances of electronic platforms interact with
existing quotation and attribution resources.

Had Enough of Experts

One domain in which quotation appears to play an important social role is in
the negotiation of expertise in relation to political opinion. The status attributed
to expert knowledge in public discourse is currently a contentious political issue,
with many commentators noting a decline in public trust of expert judgement
and an increasing gap between expert advice and public attitudes (Spicer, 2016).
Media commentary has suggested the role that platforms such a social media have
played in the rise of anti-intellectualism and public mistrust of experts. Some
commentators have also noted the impact that displays of public affect about
events on these platforms, in contrast to expression of expert opinion, is having
on social debate (Keane & Razir, 2014). In tandem with political rhetoric devalu-
ing expertise is the tendency to lampoon those who do not accept the validity
of expert knowledge. For instance, the following tweet about British politician
Michael Gove is characteristic of this kind of humorous ridicule:

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 Intersubjectivity in Microblogging 323

Gove said Britain is sick of experts well, Im volunteering to save some

money for the NHS by offering my services as his next surgeon.

This tweet intertextually references a statement made by Gove (highlighted in

bold) during a Sky News interview in the period leading up to Britains referen-
dum on leaving the European Union:

Michael Gove: ... The people who are arguing that we should get out are concerned
to ensure that the working people of this country at last get a fair deal.
I think the people of this country have had enough of experts
with organisations from acronyms sayingsaying that-
Interviewer: The people of this country have had enough of experts, what do
you mean by that?
Michael Gove: with thewith the help from organisations with acronyms saying
that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong
because these people-
Interviewer: The people of this country have had enough of experts?
Michael Gove: because these people are the same ones who have got consistently
wrong whats [been] happening.

A controversial moment during the Leave campaign, Goves statement has

widely been seen as crystallising the anti-intellectual sentiment of the movement.
This chapter explores the interplay of voices seen in heteroglossic repackaging
of Goves proposition in tweets, using a corpus of tweets containing the terms
expert, expertise, and the hashtag #brexit, part of a broader project consid-
ering the negotiation of expertise in social media discourse. It focuses in particular
on how Goves statement, that the British people have had enough of experts,
is reinstantiated in microblogging posts through various forms of quotation. This
involves considering the discourse semantic strategies employed to construe Gove
as a secondary voice (White, 2012). This voice is never neutral, since the act of
reporting what another speaker says or attributing ideas to an individual or group
is always selective and interpretive (Hunston, 2008, p.78). White (2012, p.66)
has noted that secondary voices are often dialogistically multiple with the primary
voice indicating a dialogistic stance on the part of the secondary voice. Indeed,
as we will see, mentions of Goves statement are consistently interpersonally
charged, co-occurring with a saturation of negative assessment of his perspective
on expert knowledge.

Attribution and the Heteroglossic Management

of Textual Voices
Producing texts, even those as small at a tweet, involves linguistic choices regarding
how to manage, not only the subjectivity of the author, but the points of view of
implicated personae and communities. The broad concept of intertextuality has

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 324Zappavigna

been used to suggest that this management involves establishing relations between
different texts, often across multiple contexts (Kristeva, 1984). Kristevas work on
intertextuality derives its core ideas about the nature of discourse from Bakhtins
(1935, 1981, p. 89) suggestion that discourse is inherently multi-voiced, always
making connections with other voices. The dialogic quality of discourse means
that texts involve managing degrees of otherness and our-own-ness, in the
sense of how the textual voices of authors and putative readers (or addressees or
audiences), are interrelated. Some work has foregrounded the inherently evalua-
tive nature of this heteroglossic interaction; for example, Voloshinov (1929, 1973,
1986, p. 103) has argued that all utterances are necessarily construed with an
evaluative accent, that is, they invoke value judgements implicated in particu-
lar ideological systems. This kind of perspective means that speakers and writers
encode their point of view in any utterance they produce, which has also been
seen in corpus-based approaches to stance (Stubbs, 1986, p.1).
Interpreting the significance of Foucaults reframing of authorship as a discourse
rather than an individuated persona, Fairclough has also noted the importance for
linguistics of coming to terms with the issue of subjectivity that has tended to be
marginalized in language studies, generally not going beyond theories of expres-
sion and expressive meaning and issues of identity such as social provenance,
gender, class, attitudes, beliefs and so forth (Fairclough, 1992, p. 45). How we
theorise subjectivity impacts some basic concepts assumed in theories of attribu-
tion, in particular, textual distinctions between authorial and other voices. Most
theories adopt some version of this binary: Sinclairs (1988) distinction between
stances that are averred by the author or attributed to a source is seen in
most theories of attribution. It is similar to Martin and Whites (2005) notion of
authorial and non-authorial evaluation and Hunstons (2000) categorization
of sources into self and other.
One way the sources of stances are managed in discourse is through direct and
indirect quotation. While it might be tempting to view understanding quota-
tion as relatively simple, to be interpreted only by resolving who is the source of
propositions or proposals in a text, attribution actually involves a complex dis-
course semantic patterning that foregrounds how well or how inadequately our
models of discourse cope with the intersubjective nature of communication. As
a resource, attribution can function both to positively assess a sources as valuable
or to distance the authorial voice from the source. It can also function as part of
meanings that open up or close down the dialogic space available to different
textual viewpoints (J. R Martin & White, 2005).
Beyond resolving a particular ideational source, attribution can be modelled as
part of a broader region of interpersonal meaning that Martin and White (2005)
term engagement. Engagement is a region of discourse semantics by which
the speaker/writer negotiates relationships of alignment/misalignment vis--vis
the various value positions referenced by the text and hence vis--vis the socially-
constituted communities of shared attitude and belief associated with those
positions (J. R Martin & White, 2005, p.95). Engagement, part of a framework

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 Intersubjectivity in Microblogging 325

Figure 14.1 Martin and Whites (2005) system network describing expansion of the
play of voices in a text

for interpreting the structure and function of evaluation in discourse, known as

the Appraisal framework, systematizes the kinds of meanings that can be made in
a text in relation to managing textual voices. Their complete system is beyond the
scope of this paper, but a relevant domain of meaning is shown in Figure 14.1: a
system network indicating the kinds of meanings that can be made to expand
the voices that are incorporated into a text. System networks1 visually represent
linguistic choices as interrelated options that are organised paradigmatically, in
terms of what could go instead of what, rather than syntagmatically in terms of
structure (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, p.22).
This network features two systems that entertain and attribute: enter-
taining involves foregrounding the subjectivity of the author, while attribution
involves presenting some external voice as the source for the proposition. This
source may be acknowledged, with the author remaining neutral in terms of pre-
senting a stance about the sourced material, often drawing on mental or material
processes, such as think or say (top example, Figure 14.1). The proposed
stance may also be distanced from the authorial perspective by being attributed to
an external source that the authorial voice declines to align with (bottom example,
Figure 14.1).
Martin and White (2005, p.111) suggest a range of discursive resources impli-
cated in attributions such as:

projections of speech and thought through direct or indirect reporting with

communicative and mental process verbs (e.g., say, believe, think):
e.g., direct reportingSo Michael Gove, who rubbished experts, now says
we should draw on great minds outside politics [link to YouTube video]
145#Brexit
e.g., indirect reportingGove says Britain is tired of experts and backs this up
by taking all his career advice from Rupert Murdoch #Brexit [embedded tweet]
nominalisations of these processes (e.g., the belief that):
e.g., Some have the view that #Brexit will boost property prices in the short term?
#property [URL] [embedded tweet]
adverbial adjuncts (e.g., according to):
e.g., @User1 @User2 According to #Brexit folk it was a short blip, and they
should know because they havent asked any experts.

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 326Zappavigna

It should be noted that, while the attribute system described is concerned with
the discourse semantics of attribution, it is directed towards analysing dialo-
gistic functionality rather than towards identifying the primary source of the
proposition(J. R Martin & White, 2005, p. 159). The approach to quota-
tion explained in the following section that was applied in the present study
is grounded in the work on engagement described, drawing on these ideas to
consider the choices that are implicated in construing a quoted voice in social
media texts.

Methodology

Mixed Methods Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis

The data analysis approach adopted in this chapter is a mixed method, combining
multimodal discourse analysis with corpus-based discourse analysis. The multi-
modal analysis considers the affordances of Twitter as a technology that is related
to attribution, in particular, the social media profile. The body of the posts
produced using this functionality is investigated through methods derived from
corpus linguistics, such as inspecting concordances lines, n-g rams, and annotating
sub-corpora. The #brexit expert corpus was constructed using Twitter Archiver
(Agrawal, 2016), a Google add-on script that uses the Twitter API to capture
tweets that match particular search terms and then extracts them to a Google
spreadsheet for analysis. The initial corpus was created using a search for any
tweets containing the hashtag #brexit, together with any of the following terms:
expert, experts, and expertise; for example:

@User1 @User2 yeah yeah, and toast always lands butter side down what
#Tory will cancel #Brexit by your expert opinion?
@User1 you do know that the #usepen tin foil hat, had enough of
experts #brexit mob are claiming that #remain have hacked the site?
@shrop52 you #Brexit eers have no answers to facts do you? But of course,
you dismiss expertise as irrelevant

The query was run for approximately one week (25/06/2016 02:09:16
02/07/2016 11:51:13). There were 7,948 tweets in this initial corpus that were
duplicates; they were removed to form the cleaned corpus. This resulted in a cor-
pus of 6,044 tweets. The retweets were then removed from this corpus, resulting
in a total of 3,649 tweets. This cleaned corpus was created to focus on the range
of linguistic choices for construing the quoted voice, rather than the patterns
seen only in highly retweeted posts. Leaving retweets in the corpus would skew
the results of n-g ram or word frequency analysis towards the restricted range of
choices seen in the most highly retweeted post and, hence, obscure the diversity of
ways in which the quoted voice could be construed.

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 Intersubjectivity in Microblogging 327

System Network to Explore the Quoted Voice

Annotation of the semantic patterns of discourse construing a quoted voice in
the posts was undertaken using the UAM Corpus Tool (ODonnell, 2007), an
application for concordancing, tagging, and processing corpora. The system net-
work shown in Figure 14.2 was used as the schema underlying this annotation for
exploring the quoted voice construed in a subsection of the posts (those mention-
ing Goves statement about the British people having enough of experts). Example
realizations are shown beneath the diagonal arrow, and example instances, taken
from the corpus of tweets, are shown in speech boxes.
This network is based on Whites (1998) work on journalistic voices in
which he developed the systems of extra-vocalisation and intra-vocalisation as a
means for exploring the heteroglossic play of voices in news reporting. Accord-
ing to Whites framework, extra-vocalisation is where external voices are visibly
included in a text, for example, through explicit quotation. On the other hand,
intra-vocalisation integrates other voices as part of the authors own utterances,
rather than as an explicitly external voice or discourse (White, 1998, p. 127).
White (1998, p.124) identifies two further choices for extra-vocalisation: inser-
tion, where the external voice is inserted within the text without modification
or recontextualisation (e.g., directly reported speech), and assimilation, where
the external voice is merged to some degree with that of the text (e.g., indi-
rect speech). These ideas are a more elaborate and nuanced modelling of what
Fairclough (1992) deals with at the level of structural or typographic features in
his notion of manifest intertextuality whereby other texts can be manifestly
marked or cued by features on the surface of the text, such as quotation marks or
be seamlessly incorporated into the wording of the text (Fairclough, 1992, p.104).
I further develop the system of assimilation to distinguish between contextu-
ally and co-textually abduced vocalisation in order to account for the particular
meaning-potential afforded by Twitter as a communicative channel. Contextu-
ally abduced extra-vocalisation implicates a source that is unnamed in the cotext
through contextual knowledge (e.g., knowledge that a particular phrasing is an
internet meme). For instance, in the example shown on the network, a clipped
version of Goves statement is provided with no attribution. In this example, the
hashtag #brexit functions to suggest the relevant domain of contextual meaning,
and the audience must abduce the attribution. Another instance of this type of
choice is the following:

@User1 I wonder how many of those people who say theyre sick of
experts would like to have heart surgery by a non-expert #brexit

On the other hand, co-textually abduced extra-vocalisation is the case where the
source may be inferred by being named somewhere in the co-text. The example
shown in the network names Gove, though does not involve Gove in a gram-
maticalised projection. In this case, the audience may infer a relationship between

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 network for quoted voice
Figure 14.2 System

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 Intersubjectivity in Microblogging 329

Gove and the intra-vocalised material. The use of abduction as a concept here,
relating to how sources are implicated rather than inscribed, is drawn from the
suggestion of Bateman and Wildfeuer (2014, p.183) that an inherent property
of the discourse semantic stratum in any semiotic mode is that it operates abduc-
tively: that is, as a process of defeasible hypothesis formation.
The other optional system, meta-vocalisation, preliminary at this stage [but
see Zappavigna (2015) for exploration of the linguistic functions of metadata],
considers whether the source is instantiated through metadata such as @mentions,
retweets, or hashtags. It is the beginning of attempting to systematize how multi-
modal features, for example, interactive metadata, layout, and others interact with
meanings made in the written verbiage or body of posts. Meta-vocalisation, a
form of quotation that optionally coordinates with extra- and intra-vocalisation,
is realized through the use of mode-related features such as social metadata, for
instance hashtags, and channel-specific features, such as retweets and naming
accounts via @username. Meta-vocalisation could be used to imply the origin of
a direct quote by implicating a source, or it could assist in contextually abducing
the source of an intra-vocalised indirect quote.

Results

Had Enough of Sub-corpus

The most common intertextual reference that can be automatically identified in
the cleaned corpus was reference to Goves statement, introduced at the beginning
of this chapter, that he thought the people in this country have had enough of
experts. While this is not the most frequent reference in the uncleaned corpus,
due to the presence of highly retweeted posts, its high frequency in the cleaned
corpus indicates that it has generated the highest number of unique iterations. If we
inspect the most common 3-g rams in the cleaned corpus (shown in Table14.1),
the second, third, and fourth most frequent 3-g rams are references to this quota-
tion. The 3-g ram had enough of was used to construct a small collection of
59 posts to act as an exploratory case for annotation using the system network
introduced. We now turn to the results of this annotation.

Table 14.1 Most frequent 3-g rams

3-gram Freq.

1 an expert on 75
2 had enough of 74
3 enough of experts 69
4 have had enough 38
5 impact of #Brexit 37

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 330Zappavigna

Meta-Vocalisation
While most approaches to understanding quotation have focused on the written
mode, quotation is a multimodal practice (Stec, Huiskes, & Redeker, 2016). In the
case of social media texts, quotation in written posts is inflected by the multimodal
affordances of the communication technology. Before beginning to comment
on the types of engagement visible in the corpus, it is necessary to reflect on
the multimodal constraints and affordances of Twitter. This means considering
which dimensions of the structuring of Twitter as a technology interact with how
engagement resources are deployed. Some dimensions allow the users to produce
text in relatively free-form ways, while others require adherence to various
kinds of templates. For the purposes of this chapter, we will focus on elements that
interact directly with the discourse semantics of attribution.

Multimodally Anchoring Vocalisation Through

the User Profile and Username
While social media platforms are heteroglossic spaces that allow multiple view-
points to be expressed, this expression is anchored by the communicative
resources that a particular service makes available. An important obligatory ele-
ment of any social media text is the authorship relationship established between
the social media profile and the posts that appear in the stream linked to that
profile (Figure 14.9). Any text must thus integrate two fields of discourse:
a personal discourse invoked by the social media profile, and another second-
ary discourse, for instance, in the case of #brexit tweets, that may be broadly
characterized as a political discourse. The primary field of personal discourse
combines interpersonal dimensions and the semiotic affordances of the semiotic

Figure 14.3 Anchoring role of the social media user profile

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 Intersubjectivity in Microblogging 331

mode (microblogging) to project the secondary field. In other words, the opinion
and sentiment construed about Brexit is projected by discourses about the self
and the personal. In terms of attribution, this means that the profile affords an
intermodal relationship, indicating that the posts in the unfolding social stream
are the projected meaning-making of the profile author. While in verbiage con-
sidered monomodally, saying projects locutions and thinking projects ideas (J
R Martin & Rose, 2008, p.125), instantiating that a user profile projects potential
bonds that are offered to the ambient social media audience.
This functionality also affords the possibility of meta-processes of attribu-
tion, such as retweeting, which rely on being able to republish another users post
within your own stream of posts. For example, in the following, User1s post has
been republished as a post in another users feed, signalled typographically by RT
@username:

RT @User1: At what point will @borisjohnson, #gove & @nigel_farage

apologise to the country for ignoring the experts? #Brexit

The user profile has special semiotic status in terms of multimodal attribution and
text production. For example, in the case of well-known users, establishing the
authenticity of the account is valuable. This social capital is visually legitimated
through the use of a blue tick verification symbol, which must occur in a
particular position in terms of the page layout to authenticate the profile. These
visual design choices are implicated in discourse semantic dimensions of address,
reference, and attribution instantiated in the verbiage of social media posts. Twitter
requires users to specify a username to uniquely identify the user account (e.g., @
michaelGove, Figure 14.9) and display within the profile. This may be different
than the name shown underneath the profile picture. Once this selection is made,
other users have the option of addressing, referencing, or targeting (via tagging)
the account via the special functionality afforded to the @ symbol as a marker
indicating the string directly following it is a username. We will return to this
affordance when considering meta-vocalisation in a later section.
There are also various ways, beyond grammaticalised projection within the
body of a post, that quotation of another post can occur. For example, another
users post may be quoted as a whole by embedding the post within the pri-
mary, resulting in the structure shown Figure 14.5. Here we see projection via the
username and embedding via the representation of the secondary post inside
the primary post.

Meta-Vocalisation Within Posts

Turning now to individual posts, there are a number of key resources that are
involved in quotation, often drawing on the special affordances given to characters
such as the @ for marking a username briefly introduced, and the # symbol for
indicating hashtags, which we will discuss.

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 Figure 14.4 Example of the profile of a verified Twitter account

Figure 14.5 Multimodal embedding of another users post within a tweet

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 Intersubjectivity in Microblogging 333

@username attribution
The @ character can be used on Twitter to reference other user accounts
through the concatenation of this character with the account name, for exam-
ple, @michaelgove. The @ symbol is a marker of meta-vocalisation in the
sense that it functions at a higher order of abstraction than merely using a name
in a post. This is because it enacts particular channel-specific affordances made
available by Twitter by coordinating the overlapping exchange structure that char-
acterizes Twitter conversations by supporting both addressability and coherence
management (Honeycutt & Herring, 2009). Clicking on an @username will take
the user to that microbloggers page, featuring their user profile and a sample
of their most recent posts projected by that profile, as defined in the previ-
ous section. The most common usernames associated with Gove, other than his
official account, were @michaelgovemp, @gove2016, @mickgove, @michaelgovenews,
and @michael_gove, instances of imitation or parody accounts of the kind that the
verification badge mentioned is designed to distinguish itself from.
In terms of function within a post, @ together with the username can function
like a vocative:

@michaelgove this countrys had enough of experts. Its certainly had

enough of you.

It can also function as a form of reference:

Experts have been @michaelgoves pet abomination. [embedded webpage]

And it can be used to target a particular user by tagging them in similar manner
to appending a social tag such as a hashtag:

Oh if only some experts had warned people before the vote that this
would happen @michaelgove

In terms of establishing the parameters of the quoted voice, @usernames can both
help to co-textually abduce the source of the quotation as in the following:

I think people in this country have had enough of experts. Nice one
@MichaelGoveMP. Lets put the amateurs in charge. #brexit FTW.

The @username suggests that the quoted material is related to @MichaelGoveMP,

an unverified account. Using the Twitter search function at the time of writing,
it is, however, possible to find hundreds of instances that do use the official handle
for co-textual abduction, for example:

@michaelgove this countrys had enough of experts. Its certainly had

enough of you.
@MaryCreaghMP I know, the public have had enough of experts ... eh
@michaelgove

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 334Zappavigna

Here we see further specification of the individual as a source, in terms of how

they are named, due modal diversification of the individual as both a voice
and as represented intermodally by a social media account. Play with regard
to sourcing is also a feature of the discourse of attribution, as evidenced by the
existence of fake or parody accounts. For instance, the following accounts
presented themselves as authored by Gove: @MichaelGove_PM and @Gove2018.
An account may also be managed by multiple people, in the case of a politician or
celebrity, and hence, particular typographic strategies, such as adding initials to the
end of post, indicate that a post has been authored by the actual individual rather
than their public relations team. For example, former Australian prime minister
Julie Gillard included the following in her profile description:

Official Twitter account of the 27th Prime Minister of Australia. Tweets by

Julia are signed JG.

For example, this account included tweets that adopted this convention, such as:

Aus newspaper story Kevin & I mandated curriculum themes dead wrong.
Experts not politicians wrote the curriculum. http://bit.ly/1eo3VxXJG

This strategy can be used to construe other kinds of meanings where not explicitly
or intermodally identified as a convention. For example, Goves most recent tweet,
in which he is reflecting on his time as a British Member of Parliament, featured
his initials as follows:

Its been an enormous privilege to serve for the last six years. Best of luck to
the new governmentMG

In the example, the attribution realized in the initials appears to signal some kind
of increased intimacy with the audience, perhaps to construe a kind of poignancy
to the end of his political tenure.

Hashtagging Sources
Adding a hashtag to a post is inherently heteroglossic and expands the semiotic
reach of the text by making it potentially visible to more readers. Importantly
in terms of engagement, hashtag use also renders a texts more open to exter-
nalised propositions, since tags function to aggregate texts multimodally in the
social stream (clicking on a hashtag will reveal posts containing the same tag). On
the one hand, this occurs ideationally, indicating that texts are about a common
topic; on the other hand, it can indicate shared interpersonal meanings or fore-
ground evaluative metacommentary (Zappavigna, 2015). The uncleaned #brexit
corpus (including retweets) and cleaned (without retweets) contained a range of
individuated voices instantiated as hashtags, the most frequent of which are shown

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 Intersubjectivity in Microblogging 335

Table 14.2 Hashtagged voice in the uncleaned #brexit corpus (incorporating retweets)

Persona Freq.

#trump 282
#putin 210
#farage 208
#lepen 206
#soros 129
#gove, #michaelgove 89
#carney 59
#borisjohnson, #boris 55
#cameron 14

Table 14.3 Hashtagged voice in the uncleaned #brexit corpus (without retweets)

Persona Freq.

#Gove, #MichaelGove 49
#Trump, #DonaldTrump 48
#BorisJohnson, #Boris 20
#Cameron, #DavidCameron 11
#TheresaMay 3

in Table 14.2 and Table 14.3. Where these were not sources, they were potential
targets of evaluation. Comparing these tables indicates that a lot of the posts about
American presidential candidate Donald Trump (#trump) and other international
figures were retweets, whereas there were more unique tweets about Michael Gove.
The most retweeted post featuring the hashtag #Gove is shown in Figure 14.6.
This is an example of an unsourced projecting quoted voice without a project-
ing verbal process (e.g., say, claim, state) or a source. As the diagram on the right
hand side of this figure suggests, a number of layers of projection are involved. The
microbloggers voice is projected multimodally via the authorship relation instan-
tiated via the social media profile. This comprises both projection of discourse as
well as metadiscourse (realized via the hashtag) (Figure 14.6). The hashtag could
also be associated with other material beyond the verbiage such as embedded
images. For example, the instance shown in Figure 14.6 implies a relationship
between the image of Nazi book burning with Gove, in part because the image
remains unattributed.
This is an example of how a hashtag can be used to associate reported speech
with an individual via co-textual abduction, for example:

everybodys fed up with experts #Brexit #LestWeForget #Gove appar-

ently this chap wants to become Chancellor-? a recipe for stability

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 336Zappavigna

Figure 14.6 Example of extra-vocalisation with an unattributed image

The origin of the quoted material is unattributed. As we will see in the section,
unattributed direct quotation was the most common form of quotation in posts
referring to Goves statement about having enough of experts.

Had Enough of Experts: Unsourced Extra-Vocalisation

Concordance lines for had enough of reveal a range of strategies for managing
the quoted voice, which will be considered in the following sections. The results
of the annotation of these tweets, using the system network introduced earlier
are shown in Figure 14.5. The frequencies shown on the network were calcu-
lated locally, meaning that the percentages for the two simultaneous systems are
shown independently, and each choice is calculated within a system, rather than in
relation to each choice within the entire network (global frequency).
As the network suggests, the dominant choice2 is extra-vocalisation through
unsourced insertion. The following are concordance lines for this choice, realized
as unattributed direct quotation, explicitly marked with quotation marks:

@User1 @User2 Weve had enough of experts #Brexit the new bar-
barism
People in this country have had enough of experts Think about
the that statement, and how dangerous it is #Brexit
people in this country have had enough of experts #Brexit
@User Well there were no facts in the #Brexit campaign because weve
all had enough of experts.

These surface features suggest the quoted voice, despite the elided projecting source.

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 Intersubjectivity in Microblogging 337

Figure 14.7 Percentages of different choices in quoted voice (calculated locally)

The next most frequent choice was to grammaticalise the source as project-
ing locution, with the projection realized through verbal processes (e.g., say) or
through typographic symbols, such as semi colons or dashes. For instance, the fol-
lowing are example of insertion via projection:

You *were* told. Over & over & over again. But Gove said you had had
enough of hearing from experts FFS #brexit [URL]
gove: people in this country have had enough of experts there are liars
and then there?_ johnson and gove #brexit https://t.co/nl6mti0yo1
people in his country have had enough of experts.michael gove
#eureferendum #brexit #cardiff #borisjohnson https://t.co/fba2uwxydu
gove: why dont the experts stop whining and help fix this mess? because:
this countrys had enough of experts (gove) #brexit
@User1 @User2 also michael gove re #brexit: people in this country
have had enough of experts.

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 338Zappavigna

An example of the least common insertion choice was implication, for instance:

Britains had enough of experts ... Goves putting his theory to the test
and running for PM https://t.co/NOZ4S9u8E4 #Brexit

Gove is not a projecting source in this tweet, but he rather is linked to the state-
ment through his theory, which associates the statement with the broader theory.

Memes and Verbatim/Non-Verbatim Direct Quotations

Since Goves original quote is retrievable via transcription of the recorded
interview, it was possible to determine whether a re-iteration of his statement
is verbatim or involves modification by the microblogger. There was only one
instance of verbatim quoting of the original phrasing the people of this country
have had enough of experts, which is in itself a clipping of Goves more extended
clause complex that is twice interrupted by the interviewer:

Michael Gove: I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with
organisations from acronyms sayingsaying that<<intervening
speech by interviewer>> with thewith the help from organisations
with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it
consistently wrong because these people<<intervening speech by
interviewer>> because these people are the same ones who have got
consistently wrong whats [been] happening.

Interestingly, this level of clipping matches the interviewers challenging move:

Interviewer: The people of this country have had enough of experts?

Modified quotations incorporated a range of changes to the original. Options

included altering the appraiser. For instance, the people of this country [the partici-
pant negatively assessing experts via negative affect (had enough of)] was replaced
with we, Britons, US voters, the British people, #Brexit-ers etc.:

@User1 @User2 Weve had enough of experts #Brexit the new barbarism

This potential meant that iconisation of the statement as reflective of the entire
campaign to leave the EU could be ideationally reinstantiated by referencing the
campaign through a hashtag projecting the verbiage:

2/2 After all #leave did say they had enough of experts. They can leave
the experts behind too. #Brexit #EUref #Whatnext #Loxbridge

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 Intersubjectivity in Microblogging 339

The target of the evaluation could also be modified, here as a way of humorously
ridiculing Gove:

To paraphrase, I think the people of this country have had enough of

Michael Gove . . . The Experts #Brexit #MichaelGove #Tory #The-
resaMay

In addition, the evaluation itself could be modified, but typically within the gen-
eral semantic domain of the original. For example, the process had enough of
(realizing negative affect) could be reinstantiated as sick of, tired of, fed up with etc.:

The British people are sick of experts and acronyms. Fingers crossed
@UKIP doesnt find out how much the UK spends on the UN. #Brexit
Michael Tired of Experts Gove + his performing monkey Boris.
Neither have a fucking clue what to do next #Brexit [embedded tweet]
Michael Gove, you say that you are fed up with experts. Let me
guarantee you that the feeling is mutual! #Brexit

This kind of textual play, where users contribute some iteration of a catchphrase or
other well-known utterance, has been labelled as a kind of meme, drawing on the
term coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selish Gene (2006) to suggest that we think
about culture in a similar way to genes (Wiggins & Bowers, 2015). For example, a
relevant class of memes are phrasal template memes, where the template is often a
phrase taken from a well-known person or fictional character, combined with avail-
able slots into which can be inserted different material to produce an iteration of
the meme (Zappavigna, 2012). In other words, the casing of a phrasal template is
a kind of formulaic scaffolding, while items that occur in the slots are customizable
(Zappavigna, 2012, p.106). An example of a phrasal template meme is I for one
welcome our [classifier] overlords manifest in #brexit tweets such as:

I for one welcome our new #Brexit overlord.

I for one welcome our baguette eating overlords. #Brexit
I, for one, welcome our new German overlords #Brexit

If we consider some of the posts that modify Goves statement, there appears to be
a similar style of memetic play in operation, functioning in the service of displays
of wit as a way of enacting solidarity around an anti-Gove, pro-expert position:

To paraphrase, I think the people of this country have had enough of Michael
Gove ... The Experts #Brexit #MichaelGove #Tory #TheresaMay
@MichaelGoveMP taunt that Britain has had enough of experts soon
2 turn into Britain has had enough of unscrupulous politicians #Brexit

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 340Zappavigna

However, it is much more frequent that the co-text that is used to enact this type
of humour, with Goves phrase instead occurring largely unmodified, or modified
to a small extent. For example, this type of play could occur through juxtaposition
of Goves statement with a serious context, such as medicine:

Given that #Brexit voters have had enough of experts Im opening up a

gynaecology clinic
@User hope the people that have had enough of experts have stopped
visiting there doctors and accountants #brexit
Gove visits a doctor about his bad leg. Doc youve broken your leg in 2
places. Gove: Ive heard enough from experts crawls away #brexit

Indeed, the different strategies for modifying the quoted material in terms of
appraiser and appraised were all deployed to mock Gove. This rhetoric of ridicule
was also supported by the way that direct quotations could also be used to identify
a particular community by functioning as part of a classifier. This opened up this
community for ridicule, for example:

@user you do know that the #usepen tin foil hat, had enough of experts
#brexit mob are claiming that #remain have hacked the site?
Its almost like the #Brexit weve had enough of experts tribe cant be trusted
on details & their own commitments https://t.co/6P0fQI313v
Is someone going to start the People Have Had Enough of Experts political
party? #PHHEE #Brexit

The types of memetic play identified in this section and their tendency towards
invoking negative judgement of Gove through ridicule and mockery are examples
of how the quoted voice functions to do more than source particular information
(in the sense of resolved attribution), but functions as part of a process of ambient
affiliation (Zappavigna, 2011, 2014a, 2014b), whereby the microblogger is align-
ing with other users who have presented the same stance within the social stream.

Conclusion: Ambient AffiliationMy Voice As Your Voices

This chapter has explored the resources implicated in referring to external voices
in tweets and how these resources are deployed to construe a quoted voice in
microblogging posts. A dominant pattern in the communications considered was
unattributed inserted extra-vocalisation in the form of direct quotations. These
are instances where the otherness of the potential source is explicitly inscribed
through typographic features such as quotation marks, often used within gram-
maticalised projection of verbiage by an individuated quoter (e.g., Gove in the
annotated sub-corpus of had enough of experts tweets). However, despite this
inscription, no source is instantiated in the post.

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 Intersubjectivity in Microblogging 341

This tendency towards unattributed direct quotation may perhaps be related to

the social function of posts in terms of the construal of ambient identity within
the social network. While attribution research has suggested that quotation high-
lights the distinction between the authorial voice and other voices, or my voice
and your voice, social media seems to disrupt this binary affording a my voice/
voices relation.3 This is in part because of the anchoring function of the social
media profile, which we considered in Section 4, with the profile and @username
enabling meta-vocalisation of the social media users voice via multimodal projec-
tion and embedding. In other words, all posts are, at one level of abstraction, the
projected voice of the user, even as they incorporate other voices at the level of
individual posts.
Thus, an individual user can adopt a stance that has been uttered by someone
else and present it as their own or as that of the persona enacted by their stream of
posts. While on the one hand, this might serve an aligning function, we see in the
posts considered in this chapter that it can also serve dis-aligning and re-aligning
function. In other words, it can be used to associate the social media user with a
particular perspective, for instance, with enlightened personae who pay attention
to the wisdom of experts. This in turn de-aligns the user from other anti-expert
viewpoints. For example:

Now that the British people have had enough of Experts we can save at
least 120bn per year of the NHS and education budgets. #Brexit

While rallying around negative assessment of a quoted stance is possible, what

is achieved through the quoted voice exemplified is more nuanced, and per-
haps more rhetorically powerful, than simply directly indicating that the quoted
statement is incorrect or unwarranted. Instead, the position is being mocked by
humourosly performing the stance as if it were the users own. This function
could also be achieved with intra-vocalisation:

Ive had enough of experts, so Im sacking my doctor, my dentist and so on,

and asking my mate down the pub to do all that stuff.for me.

In both the posts, Goves statement about experts is negatively valorized as a

bonding icon (Stenglin, 2008) and employed by the microblogger to mock mis-
trust of expert knowledge. The posts analysed in the paper suggest that, beyond
resolving the source of a particular voice, it is important to consider the per-
spective of affiliation (i.e., the social bonds at stake), because the source is always
envisaged in relation to a potential reader or audience. In this sense, and Bakhtins
sense, the play of voices in a text is never neutral. I will conclude this paper with
my personal favourite #brexit post:

Had enough of experts, next time I go to hospital I will insist on having my

operation performed by a chef. Hes good with a knife after all

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 342Zappavigna

Notes
1 System networks are an alternative to modelling language as a catalogue of structures.
This kind of systemic orientation to meaning arose out of the Firthian tradition in lin-
guistics which asserted the need for a distinction between structure and system, that is,
between syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations in language (Firth, 1957).
2 That is, the choice with the most unique tweets, since retweets have been factored out of
the cleaned corpus.
3 I am indebted to Sumin Zhao for making clear this relation in our work on social media
images.

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