Abstract
This paper draws on Hyland's (2005) dialogic and interpersonal view of metadiscourse and the distinction between interactive and interactional resources. It is concerned with the phenomenon of scare quoting and its occurrence in British hard news reports.
Scare quotes are understood as signals of authorial intrusion that call readers' attention to the enclosed words and facilitate engagement between the writer, the reader and possibly other voices external to the text, together with the values and interests these voices and their respective communities embrace (Bednarek, 2006; Dillon, 1988; Fairclough, 1993; Finkbeiner, 2015; Gutzmann & Stei, 2011; Lakoff, 1981; Meibauer, 2015; Nacey, 2009; Predelli, 2003; Richardson, 2007; Schneider, 2002; Thompson, 1994). While scare quotes are explicit non-verbal markers of writer intrusion (e.g.
Crismore et al., 1993), the metalinguistic comment is implicit and formulated by the reader rather than the writer. In this paper the functions of scare quotes are interpreted from a dialogic and generic perspective (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984; Dillon, 1988; Martin & White, 2005; White, 1998, 2012).
The analysis has shown that the interactive type of comment is predominantly bound to authorial language, concerns matters of text-processing (e.g. conceptual novelty, meaning modification, register and style discrepancy) and reflects two important features of hard news writing, namely topicality of news events and an appeal to a heterogenous mass audience. On the other hand, the interactional kind of comment tends to relate to words originating with an external voice and expresses negative evaluation.
In many cases the formulation of a negative assessment seems to be a mere potentiality dependent on the presence of contextual cues and the reading position of the receiver. The nature of the interactional comment can be explained by two other features of hard news discourse, more specifically a propensity for negativity and suppression of explicit authorial evaluation (Martin & White, 2005; White, 1998, 2012).