OTRA LECTURA DE LA UNIDAD EN LA MISMIDAD

As noted above, I believe it is possible and useful to distinguish between gram- matical/pragmatic and discoursal perspectives on intersubjectivity. The discoursal perspective broadly involves viewing discourse as dialogistic: constructed funda- mentally in terms of exchanges between interactants in communicative events in which each interactant shapes their message to accommodate and affect the other. Bakhtin argues that every utterance (whether a single turn in a conversation or a lengthy written text) responds to previous utterances: “Every utterance must be re- garded as primarily a response to preceding utterances … Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 91). At the same time it anticipates potential future responses: “the speaker talks with an expectation of a response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth (with vari- ous speech genres presupposing various integral orientations and speech plans on the part of speakers or writers)” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 69). Thus, in the most general terms, all discourse can be seen as inherently intersubjective, with specific, identi- fiable traces of this characteristic.

It is true that this all-encompassing view appears to go against Traugott’s rela- tively restrictive circumscribing of what counts as intersubjective:

While subjective expressions are available for virtually any linguistic purpose, intersubjective ones are largely limited to certain turn-taking contexts that are bracketed by hedging discourse markers like well, tags like clause-final right?, addressee-oriented expressions such as question-markers, or, more generally, ad- dressee honorifics. (Traugott 2007: 298)

However, this list reflects grammatical/pragmatic concerns, in that it is strongly oriented towards formal elements, the changes in usage of which can be tracked diachronically. The discoursal perspective is in line with the more open-ended characterization of intersubjectivity in Traugott (2003: 128): “Intersubjectivity is the explicit expression of the SP/W’s [speaker/writer’s] attention to the ‘self’ of ad- dressee/reader in both an epistemic sense (paying attention to their presumed atti- tudes to the content of what is said), and in a more social sense (paying attention to their ‘face’ or ‘image needs’ associated with social stance and identity)”. There have been proposals to expand the list offered by Traugott (2007): for example, Breban (2010) makes a strong case for including determining elements, since they are one of the means by which “the speaker negotiates the tracking and interconnecting of discourse referents by the hearer” (Davidse et al. 2008: 142). Furthermore, if one takes a dialogistic perspective on discourse, a number of other linguistic resources which are traditionally regarded as subjective can be more illuminatingly seen as intersubjective. For example, evaluative expressions are not (just) subjective out- pourings of self-oriented feeling, but function intersubjectively: “declarations of attitude are dialogically directed towards aligning the addressee into a community of shared value and belief” (Martin & White 2005: 95). This is particularly evident in the case of invoked, or implicit, evaluation. Here, the addresser offers informa- tion which is not explicitly marked as evaluative, but which is designed to evoke an evaluative response in the addressee, thus creating a communicative space for the addressee to collaborate in the construction of the discourse by recognizing and accepting the evaluative potential of the information. In example (1), the reader of the blog is projected as sharing with the writer the culturally-specific belief that for men to wear socks with sandals is a sartorial blunder:1

(1) But I really shouldn’t care about that stuff, he’s a great guy. But really…socks with sandals…all the time?

Similarly, epistemic modality is not seen purely in terms of assessment of truth val- ue or of self-oriented degrees of speaker certainty but as a resource for interpersonal negotiation. Thompson & Zhou (2000: 130) point out that: “As Halliday (1994: 89) puts it: ‘you only say you are certain when you are not’ — or, in a broader and per- haps more accurate wording, saying explicitly that you believe something to be true admits the possibility of it not being believed to be true by everyone.” There appears to be a cline from cases where the speaker is genuinely (un)certain, as in example

(2), to those where the modality is intersubjectively oriented to the addressee, in that it does not signal the speaker’s uncertainty but their willingness to entertain, at least provisionally, a belief potentially held by the addressee, as in example (3): (2) I did turn that on and it may have helped, I’m not sure.

(3) Avoid fast food. … Fast food may be handy, but often is high in fat and calories.

Although the intersubjective aspects are less salient in examples like (2), even here the speaker can be seen as offering the proposition ‘it helped’ but leaving it open for the addressee to validate (compare the discussion of the “dialogic expansive- ness of modality and evidentiality” in Martin & White 2005: 104–108). The exam- ple is taken from an online forum where people can seek advice about computer problems, and the writer appears to be using modality not only to show uncer- tainty but to project himself as less knowledgeable than the expert to whose advice he is responding: that is, the modality contributes to constructing the roles of both interactants in the exchange in (2) as much as in (3).2

One way of investigating the phenomenon of intersubjectivity in this broader sense is through the concept of ‘reader-in-the-text’ (Thompson & Thetela 1995).3

Other terms which are used for this concept in different approaches include ‘ideal reader’ (e.g. Culler 1982), ‘ideal subject’ (e.g. Talbot 1992) and ‘implied reader’ (Iser 1972); but the admittedly clumsy formulation of ‘reader-in-the-text’ has the advantage that it makes absolutely explicit that the focus is on evidence in the text itself. This virtual entity, which haunts all discourse, is construed by configura- tions of linguistic choices which reflect the writer’s expectations about what the addressee may bring to the text and the kinds of response that the text will elicit from the addressee. These choices project a reader with certain attitudes, knowl- edge, assumptions, status, etc. and assign roles for that reader to play in the un- folding of the discourse. The extent to which any individual ‘real-world’ readers fit themselves into the semiotic shape moulded for them by the text is, of course, unpredictable: these readers may adopt a compliant stance (even if on a provi- sional basis) or a resistant one — or may switch between these at different stages of the reading.

It is worth noting that the distinction between responding to previous utter- ances and formulating one’s present utterance in anticipation of reactions from addressees is less salient in this perspective, since the reader-in-the-text may be construed both as one of the (potential) sources of propositions to which the writer is responding, as in example (4), and as reacting in a particular way to the writer’s propositions, as in (5) — the propositions attributed to the reader-in-the- text are highlighted.

(4) It has been argued that most libraries have Internet access. However, many people with disabilities, especially those in rural areas, do not have access to accessible transportation and cannot get access to information available on Internet.

(5) I mean, at first glance, it might appear that this was all completely my fault, but really, it’s not.

Indeed, in many cases the two possibilities may be simultaneously in play: for instance, in example (3) above the proposition ‘fast food [is] handy’ can be seen as an objection which the writer anticipates that the reader-in-the-text will raise in response to her command to avoid fast food precisely because she is aware that this proposition has been previously uttered by people like the reader-in-the-text. It should also be stressed that, in analysing discourse, even the absence of expres- sions of modality, attitude, etc. is intersubjectively significant. Such absence indi- cates, broadly, a decision not to negotiate with the addressee at that point in the discourse, which in itself indicates that the writer construes the reader-in-the-text as, for whatever reason, not needing to be ‘managed’ at that point.

The range of features which contribute to the intersubjective construal of the reader-in-the-text is considerably more extensive than those suggested in Traugott (2007), and it is difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at an exhaustive list. Some of the areas which have proved illuminating to explore, within and between clauses, are: interactant pronouns (Kim 2009); non-declarative mood choices (Thompson & Thetela 1995); modalization (Martin & White 2005; see example (3) above); polarity (Jordan 1998); evaluation (Martin & White 2005); unattributed/general mental and verbal processes (Thompson 2001; see example (4) above with the verbal process it has been argued); concession (Thompson & Zhou 2000); and Hypothetical-Real (Winter 1994; see example (5) above).4

It is unsurprising that dialogistic intersubjectivity tends to be more salient in persuasive texts, which are inherently shaped with the persuadee in mind. Earlier studies have explored the notion of reader-in-the-text in texts such as advertise- ments (Thompson & Thetela 1995) and academic writing (Thompson 2001), as culturally significant exemplars of persuasive discourse. In the present article, I will focus on newspaper editorials, as another prime instance of frequently-en- countered texts which aim to engage directly with their readership in order to encourage persuasion and affiliation: as Wahl-Jorgensen (2008: 67) notes “It is in editorials that newspapers speak both for and to their audience” (see also Le 2010 on the contribution of editorials to the construction of the socio-cultural context in which media position themselves). One reason for selecting this text type is that the diversity of stances found in the press allows comparisons which bring out the fact that, within the same genre, different writers may construe different

kinds of reader-in-the-text, and which thus help to highlight the choices that have been made. I will compare editorials from two contrasting UK newspapers: one, the Guardian, represents the ‘quality’ press, and advances broadly liberal views in social and political matters, while the other, the Sun, is categorized as ‘popular’ and is, often stridently, right-wing in its political views and conservative on so- cial issues. I will examine the ways in which three representative sets of linguistic resources — interactant reference, response-expecting speech functions and mo- dality — are deployed in the editorials to construct different kinds of readers-in- the-text which reflect the different expectations of the audience (in both senses: the groups that the newspaper writers expect to be writing for, and the values, attitudes, knowledge, etc. that readers expect to be catered for in the newspaper).