Analogical reasoning with quotations? A spotlight on Russian parliamentary discourse

Journal of Pragmatics 155 (2020) 101e110

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Analogical reasoning with quotations? A spotlight on Russian parliamentary discourse Daniel Weiss €t Zürich, Plattenstrasse 43, CH-8032, Zürich, Switzerland Slavic Linguistics, Slavisches Seminar der Universita

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 3 February 2019 Received in revised form 28 July 2019 Accepted 11 October 2019 Available online 7 November 2019

Quotations in political discourse often aim at buttressing the current speaker's argument in an ongoing debate by citing an utterance that states, presupposes or implies an analogous thought. Given the controversial nature of analogical reasoning, this raises a number of questions. First, why does the speaker choose an argumentative strategy that is vulnerable in several respects, easily refutable by providing counter-analogies, questioning the analogy's relevance, etc.? Second, are the intertextual references meant to enhance the analogy, or do they offer additional pragmatic values that could compensate the “detour” caused by introducing a new voice? For instance, does the quoter align or disalign with the quoted analogy? Does s/he support or delegitimize other deputies? What benefits are offered by fictive quotations and how do “canned” quotations, such as proverbs, contribute to the speaker's strategic goals? The study is based on a sample of quotations from the Russian State Duma. The analogies found allow for the conclusion that the intertextual strategy does not invite a debate on the analogy itself but rather prevents further discussion by focusing the attention on other effects, such as face-threatening acts, entertainment, self-staging or creating a common ground. This holds also for fictive references. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Analogical arguments Fictive interaction Political discourse Proverbs Quotations Russian state Duma

1. Introduction This study continues a series of papers on parliamentary discourse in today's Russia, among which Weiss, 2016a was already devoted to the analysis of quotations. The term ‘quotation’ is interpreted very broadly: it encompasses direct, indirect and mixed citations, full and truncated versions, paraphrases and even mere mentions of authors, titles or main characters. Quotations thus “can be analysed in terms of a notion of representation by resemblance” (Wilson, 2012: 243; original emphasis), and “Resemblance involves shared properties” (Wilson, 2012: 244). Direct quotation is not assumed to provide a faithful verbatim reproduction of the original source. For arguments in favor of this approach, see besides Wilson (2012) and Clark and Gerrig (1990:795 ff.). Unlike Bublitz (2015:1), my research also includes pre-patterned (“canned”) examples, which allow for a high degree of formal variability. Therefore, such pre-patterns sometimes even risk to fail in their purpose. For instance, if the quoters do not identify their source and render too small a portion of the quoted, they may miss the chance to deliver the full blow of their argument against the opponents; two such cases are examined in (Weiss, 2016a:192 f., 208). The scope of this mainly qualitative investigation is limited to xeno-quotations, i.e. quotations of sources from outside the house, which allows to better capture the national particularities of Russian parliamentary discourse; for a detailed

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motivation, see (Weiss, 2016a: 185). Note that this does not exclude self-quoting: for instance, S. Lavrov, the Russian minister of Foreign Affairs, frequently quotes his own words from the UN assembly when delivering a speech in Parliament. The present study seeks to elucidate the role of arguments from analogy in quotations. An analogy always involves some similarity (resemblance, likeness) between two entities (facts, events, norms, etc.) X and Z. Analogies belong to different subtypes whose nature is controversially debated in the literature; two of them will be briefly presented below. An argument from analogy is most often treated as a subtype of a comparison composed of a minor and a major premise and a conclusion/ standpoint: “Y is true of X, because Y s true of Z and Z is comparable to X” (van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 1992). In political discourse a speaker uses the argument from analogy for strategic purposes: they intend to convince the audience that X be brought about, abolished, changed or maintained, with Z supporting this claim. The conclusion “Y is true of X” may also be undesirable, in which case the argument (from negative analogy) functions as a warning or criticism. If the analogy engenders an argumentative exchange including an opponent and/or the speaker themselves, this will be called an analogical argumentation. And finally, if the speaker resorts to a quotation as vehicle of the analogical argument, he uses an analogical quotation. The principal aim of this study is to determine why a speaker chooses this detour by introducing a new voice: are the intertextual references simply meant to enhance the analogy, or do they offer additional pragmatic values? A first working hypothesis could be that this strategy is not likely to trigger full-fledged argumentations: quotations that involve analogical reasoning usually offer a wealth of other aspects that may distract the audience's attention. From the quoter's perspective, they thus provide a comfortable “killer argument” in that they do not invite discussion about the analogy itself. The study is based on a sample of 528 quotations that stem from 47 sessions of the Russian State Duma (the lower house of Russian parliament) spanning the period from 4 September 2007 to 16 September 2014. The sessions were selected according to the following criteria: sixteen were at least partly devoted to highly controversial issues and included two question hours; the agenda of the remaining ones were dominated by routine matters. As was expected, hotly debated issues engendered more quotations than everyday routine; the same holds for irony, fresh metaphors, and rhetorical questions. The sample of quotations based on analogy encompasses 100 tokens. The study is structured as follows: Section 2 briefly discusses different argumentative uses of quotations in terms of argumentation theory and then zooms in on the type based on analogical arguments. Sections 3e5 illustrate three different subtypes, and Section 6 adds the conclusions. 2. Arguing with quotes In Weiss (2016a, 2016b) the argumentative impact of many quotations was examined in detail, though not in terms of argument schemes. In the present study, the three fundamental argument schemes are taken from van Eemeren and Grootendorst (2004). Their main purpose lies in offering different conditions of acceptability for defending a given standpoint. In all three cases a possible counterargument may attack one or more premises, the conclusion or the inference from premises to conclusion. The following example illustrates all three argument schemes: the current speaker announces that his fraction (the communists) will not endorse the project to introduce the principle of bargaining that characterizes American procedural law into Russian criminal law. He does so by quoting a famous Russian historian: (1) То, что нам сегодня предлагают со ссылкой на зарубежный опыт, абсолютно не годится. Я вам могу привести слова известного историка Ключевского, который сказал, что слепое копирование западного образца и перенесение его на тело России ничего хорошего не вызовет, кроме раковой опухоли. Вот сегодня мы действительно копируем американский образец. What they are proposing us now with reference to foreign experience is an absolute failure. I (may) quote to you the words of the well-known historian Klju cevskij who said that blind copying of a Western model and transferring it on Russia’s body cannot bring about anything positive except cancer. Today we are indeed copying an American model. V. Il’juxin, 15 February 2008 The quote is introduced explicitly by a hedged performative (lit.: “I can quote”) and the mention of the source and rendered in indirect speech. The argumentative structure is transparent: minor premise ¼ ‘this project aims at copying an American legal procedural rule’, major premise ¼ ‘blind copying of Western rules will produce disastrous effects in Russia’, and conclusion: ‘this bill will have a disastrous effect on Russia’. The minor premise is first merely alluded to (“foreign experience”), then explicitly expressed in the last sentence. The major premise includes a metaphor attributed to Klju cevskij: ‘blind copying from the West will only produce cancer’ (and ‘cancer is disastrous’).1 Next, a second argument scheme has to be added: ‘If a law has a negative effect on Russia, it should be refuted’; ‘this law has a negative effect on Russia’; final conclusion: ‘this law must not be passed by the House’. The whole fragment represents the pragmatic subtype of causal argumentation by “presenting something as a means to a certain end” (van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1992:97), or more precisely its negative variant (avoiding an undesirable consequence). The metaphor ‘political evil is cancer’ belongs to the argument scheme that is based on comparison (for a different opinion, see Section 2.1). The mapping from bodily disease (cancer) to Russia in “Russia's

1

The ironic wording ‘nothing positive except cancer’ obviously belongs to Klju cevskij.

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body” results in a blend (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) of source and target.2 Finally, quoting Klju cevskij also provides an argument from authority, which represents a case of symptomatic argumentation. Thus, all three main types (symptomatic, causal, comparative) of argumentation distinguished by the “Amsterdam School” interact in this example. The embedding of the argument from analogy (metaphor) in a subordinative argument structure intended to defend the pragmatic argument is a frequent pattern found in political discourse (van Eemeren and Garssen, 2014: 54). 2.1. Analogical arguing with quotes The remainder of this paper is devoted to arguments that usually are held to belong to the comparative scheme: they are based on analogies. Many scholars hold the view that analogical argumentation is inherently fallacious (see the overview of the literature in Kienpointner, 2012), whereas others consider it “not only as an ubiquitous, but also as a rational, albeit weak and often defeasible means of argumentation” (op.cit: 111); see also Walton et al. (2008: 61) and Ribeiro (2014). Many authors limit their discussion to figurative analogies, which connect two different domains of reality. In contrast, Walton et al. (2008:43ff.) also include “same-domain” analogies, a decision I will adhere to. Finally, the conclusions to be drawn from analogies may be divided into descriptive and normative ones, the latter encompassing legal, religious or behavioral codes. As for the different subtypes of arguments from analogy, it should be noted that the logical inductive scheme quoted in Walton (2014:28), stating that “entities a, b, c, d all have the attributes P and Q; a, b, c all have the attribute R; therefore d probably has the attribute R” is not represented in my dataset. The analogies here usually include only two entities a and b and the properties involved rarely number more than one, an exception being the altered version of a proverb in example 11. Yet, “quantitative analogies, i.e. analogies whose soundness is a matter of how many properties are shared by both analogs”, are not superior to “qualitative analogies, i.e. analogies whose soundness is a matter of how significant is the comparison between them” (Bermejo-Luque, 2014: 59). Indeed, specialists of analogical argumentation usually point out that the different properties involved should be weighed by their relevance for the given case. However, not a single quotation based on analogy in my sample triggers such a dispute. This confirms the doubts about the suitability of quotations as full-fledged tools of analogical argumentation signaled above. Another important subtype is constituted by figurative analogies. It is well attested in my data but its theoretical assessment remains controversial. Thus, (Garssen, 2009: 137 f.) argues that figurative analogies should not be considered a subtype of the comparison argument scheme but rather “presentational devices” for other schemes, since they do not allow for the same standard critical questions as comparisons; this holds in particular for proverbs (see Section 5). Within differentn ~ ez, domain analogies, one can further distinguish between proper figurative analogies and metaphorical analogies (Santiba 2010). Xu and Wu (2014: 3) posit a continuum between them with metaphors marking the maximal semantic distance between source and target. The linguistic formatting of these two subtypes is practically never discussed, although all examples examined clearly show that unlike comparisons, metaphors never encompass whole clauses or sentences but are limited to the phrasal (NP or VP) level; when explicated, they take the form of binominal predications, such as ‘life is a journey’, ‘nations are families’ or ‘social problems are bodily diseases’. Among the examples to be discussed here, only the cancer in (1) and the tajga in (10) fit into this pattern. Explicit markers of comparisons such as “like”, “similar to Y” or “X is reminiscent of Y” function mostly in the clause or sentence format but may also co-occur with metaphors; moreover, in the latter case special metacommunicative formulas (“as they say”) are available. Quotations based on analogies have so far never been discussed as a separate subtype of analogical reasoning. In formal terms, they are sometimes introduced by the same comparison markers as metaphors or explicit comparisons (“as in the wellknown fable”, “this is similar to/reminds Q's words”). Moreover, the quotation may be marked as such by quotatives as “I quote” or “Remember X's words?” (see example 2). Quotations can be pre-fabricated, ready-made (“canned”) units or introduce a statement in an analogical context for the first time. They involve both same-domain and different-domain analogies. Example (2) stems from the debate preceding deputy G. Gudkov's unprecedented and anti-constitutional exclusion from the House. The victim had in his defense speech stressed that the incriminations about his alleged illegal business transactions lacked any foundation. His party colleague unveils the real motivation behind the majority's intention: (2) Знаете, получается аргументация такая: "Ты виноват уж тем, что хочется мне кушать", d помните, у Крылова в басенке? You know, your argumentation runs like this: “You are guilty by the mere fact that I am hungry”, you remember [this] from Krylov’s fable?’ Drapeko E. G., 14 September 2012 This is a figurative analogy rendered by a “canned” quote known from school. The lawless behavior of the House is paralleled to the behavior of the wolf in the fable which needs no other justification than the wish to devour the victim. The analogy again supports3 the pragmatic target argument, which is structured in the following way: 1. The house has no legal argument against Gudkov (minor premise); 2. If the house has no legal arguments against a deputy, it must not exclude them

2 3

For a comprehensive analysis of nation-as-body metaphors in political discourse, see Musolff (2016). Or, in terms of Garsson (2009) (see above): it serves as a presentational device for the pragmatic argument.

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(major premise); 3. The House must not exclude Gudkov (conclusion). The quote allows the quoter to support her colleague and at the same time discredit the majority's stance. When the House discussed a new bill regulating stock exchange transactions, the term “insider”, which obviously was not familiar to many deputies (one deputy even quoted a note he had taken from a dictionary, which offered several translations), provoked an extended debate with some members proposing to replace it by a Russian term. This view was lively opposed by the minister who commented on the new bill: (3) Вы, наверное, помните, что Хрущёв запретил использование слова "меню" и заменил его "разблюдовкой", потребовал, чтобы во всех ресторанах и столовых лежал лист с названием "разблюдовка". Ну и где эта "разблюдовка" теперь? Кому-то из присутствующих слово "меню" слух режет? Нет. Профессионалам "инсайд" слух тоже не режет. You certainly remember that Xrus cev prohibited using the word “menju” and replaced it with “razbljudovka”, demanding that in all restaurants and cafeterias there lie a sheet called “razbljudovka”. So where is this “razbljudovka” today? Does the word “menju” offend anybody’s ear in here? No. Neither will the special term “insajd”. A. Sinenko, 28 January 2009 The same-domain analogy established in the indirect quotation (in the sense of Wilson (2012: 243) “demanding that…” provides the first minor premise of the argument: Xruscev coined an artificial neologism (bljudo means ‘dish’) meant to replace the traditional ‘menu’, originally a foreign loanword, which however did not survive its author: as shown by the subsequent two rhetorical questions, nobody objects to the traditional term nowadays. All this constitutes the minor premise, which now engenders the implicature that artificial neologisms will not succeed in ousting generally accepted international terms; this provides the unexpressed major premise. The core of the analogy relates the term ‘insider’ to the term ‘menu’, both being wide-spread international terms. The conclusion must be to accept this term rather than introducing any Russian equivalent into the bill. The minister thus wants to support his argument by disaligning with the source. Nevertheless, the analogy is fallacious since unlike menju, which at Xrus cev's time was already a firmly established term in Russian, insajd was a brand-new loan word in 2009, hence the resistance it met seems justified. Analogical quotations are similar to explicit comparisons, where the current speaker himself provides a parallel to the situation to be discussed, and conventional metaphors based on analogy (Weiss, 2017). By contrast, their argumentative value differs sharply from the argumentative use of the two competing strategies. Both comparisons and analogical metaphors lend themselves freely to counterarguments questioning the analogy itself.4 This does not hold for quotations, however. After examining 100 quotations based on analogical reasoning from my State Duma data, my findings are discouraging: except example (10), see below, these quotations did not invite any in-depth discussion of the analogy at hand by weighing all pros and cons.5 The reasons for this are manifold. Sometimes the quotation contains a truism that is not worth discussing; in other cases the argument from authority may prevent an objection. Quotations from widely known literary works often trigger a pleasant recognition effect (reflected by the audience's back-channel behavior) that does not stimulate further reflections on the analogy intended. Still different is the case of proverbs, whose figurative interpretation is part of the lexicon and therefore always highlights the same property to be shared with the target. For instance, in Russian Pervyj blin (vysel) komom ‘the first pancake came as a clot’ holds the conventional meaning of “the first result of some process is often a failure”; it makes little sense to argue that pancakes have a host of other properties that do not match the given target of the comparison (see, however, Section 5 for proverbs that do not pass uncontested). Most often the quotation seems to distract the attention of the audience from the analogy itself by highlighting such effects as discrediting the opponent or the bill under discussion, entertaining the audience, creating common ground, and self-staging. In my sample, all excerpts revealed either alignment (14 cases) or disalignment (86 cases) with the target issue or person. Moreover, the quoter may also endorse the quoted (68 cases) or disapprove of it (32, among them examples (2e3)). Approval is most often not expressed explicitly but has to be inferred from the relevance maxim and is often boosted by the authority of the source. Moreover, 17 examples attested a clear humorous or ironic (including selfirony) intention and were often received with unequivocal back-channel behavior. All this helps explain why follow-ups (Fetzer et al., 2012), if they do occur, always refer to one of the aforementioned effects. That was the case with Xrus cev's neologism mentioned in example (3): the quotation triggered three follow-ups, two of them targeting the politician Xrus cev and one proposing a Russian equivalent of the term “insider”. The analogy with the neologism itself, although highly vulnerable, was not questioned. This said, it seems preferable to focus on particular types of quotations that offer additional benefits of argument by analogy. In Section 3, two quotations will be examined that contain a double message: an explicit one conveyed by the quote and an implicit one hidden in the reference to the source. Sections 4 and 5 contrast two opposite types: they illustrate the benefits of fictive quotations and proverbs, thus examining quotations that are unknown to the audience and quotations that the speaker assumes most hearers know.

4

For metaphors, see the controversies about different metaphors related to the future of the EU analyzed in Musolff (2004). By contrast, Musolff (this volume) presents a host of attacks against B. Johnson's proverbial cake analogy; however, this quote was right from the beginning distorted and illogical. 5

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3. Arguing by reference to the source The mass executions of 22,000 Polish prisoners committed by the NKVD in spring 1940 in the Katyn' forests and other places initiated a long-standing dispute between the Soviet Union, followed by post-Soviet Russia, and Poland that related not only to government and parliamentary interaction, but also to legal and media discourse and comprised national and international institutions. Soviet authorities had always denied their responsibility for this crime until 1990 (this denial came to be known as the ‘Katyn’ lie’), when the Polish president Jaruzelski paid an official visit to the Soviet leader Gorba cev. But the subsequent events did not satisfy the Polish claims at all. In November 2010, the Russian State Duma decided on a gesture of reconciliation towards the Polish people by adopting a resolution that aimed at definitely renouncing the Katyn’ lie and opening a new page in the common history of the two nations (Weiss, 2019). This resolution was approved against the heavy resistance of the communist fraction. It did not respond to all Polish demands, especially the recognition of the massacre as a genocide, and found little resonance in Poland. The Katyn’ debate involved a host of historical and legal documents both from World War II and from the recent controversy. As a result, it abounded in quotations from these sources. Intertextual references and allusions to literary works and films played only a marginal role. Most noteworthy is the absence of proverbs, which are so frequent in other Duma debates.6 All in all, the Katyn’ debate provided no less than 145 quotations within a total length of 11,614 words, which is an unexcelled record among the 47 Duma debates investigated so far. Some quotations came in bundles of up to five stacked instances. The following two examples are taken from the initial speech by K. Kosa cev, the head of the committee in charge of the text of the resolution. (4)

…но ложь Катыни никуда не девалась. Как сказано в священной для обоих христианских народов книге, нет ничего тайного, что не сделалось бы явным, и наша задача сегодня d убрать с дороги эту ложь. …But the Katyn’ lie was still there. As the holy book of both our Christian nations says, there is nothing secret that will not become manifest, and it is our duty today to remove this lie from our way. K.I. Kosacev, 26 November 2010

The citation adds a new argument to an already established normative thread of argumentation: the Katyn’ lie still constitutes the main obstacle to an improvement of the Polish-Russian relationship and therefore has to be removed. The speaker has already dwelled on the impact of this lie in his speech. The quotation provides a descriptive generalization from which we may conclude that the Katyn’ lie will also become manifest7; the step from here to practical reasoning (cf. ‘it is our duty’) remains unexpressed. What seems more intriguing, though, is the circuitous reference to the source: why does the author not directly name the bible? At first glance, this violates Grice's maxims of modality and quantity and triggers the implicature that the reference conveys a more important message. The circumlocution “the holy book of both our Christian nations” does two things: first, it provides an argument from authority, cf. ‘the holy book’, second, it existentially presupposes the common religious core values of the two nations. It thus creates a common ground shared by the final addressee, the Polish nation. The implicit same-domain analogy runs as follows: ‘Much as our two nations have religious values in common, they will be capable of finding a common interpretation of their past’.8 Since what divides them at the moment is the Katyn’ lie, we end up with the final conclusion: ‘Let us remove this obstacle to fully restore our common values’. As can be seen, this simply adds a new argument in favor of the ultimate action, but does so with the reference to the authoritative source rather than by means of the quotation itself. On the whole, we are thus dealing with a double support for the ongoing argumentation in which both the citation and its source participate. The next analogy connects two different domains of reality. The citation works in a similar way as the preceding example but shifts the main weight from the quotation to the reference, which again flouts both the modality and quantity maxims: (5) Как говорил один из героев фильма русского режиссёра Тарковского по роману польского писателя Лема: "Здесь, скорее, что-то с совестью". Полагаю, это действительно вопрос нашей совести: принять наконец, после стольких лет отрицаний и умолчаний, заявление, которое закрыло бы эту страницу истории, открыв при этом, как всегда это бывает, новую страницу истории. As one of the main characters of the film by the Russian director Tarkovsky based on the novel by the Polish writer Lem put it: "Here is probably something that has to do with (a bad) conscience". I think this is really a question of our conscience: after so many years of denials and concealments, we should finally adopt this declaration that would close this page of history and open, as it always happens, a new page of history. K.I. Kosacev, 26 November 2010 Why not refer to the film directly by its title “Solaris”? Hardly anybody in the audience was unfamiliar with this highly popular science fiction film. What is highlighted instead is the common cultural achievement of the two nations: a novel by a

6

See the quantitative analysis of different types of sources in Weiss (2016a: 199 ff.). The semantic link between the concepts ‘lie’ and ‘secret’ remains to be explicated; see also example 5 for the combination of ‘denials’ and ‘concealments’. 8 A stronger but less convincing assumption would be the non-analogical causal interpretation: ‘since our two nations have religious values in common…’. 7

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famous Polish author adapted by a no less famous Russian film director. The quoted text itself refers somewhat vaguely to a new moral instance (conscience), which is added to the reasons for overcoming the Katyn’ lie. But the main motivation for the whole wording lies in the reference to the source and its relevance for both nations: if two individuals jointly succeeded in achieving such a highly esteemed result, why shouldn't their two nations together also come to terms with their past?17 The prerequisite, however, is to remove their main source of dissent: the Katyn’ lie. 4. Fictive quotations Fictive or hypothetical utterances offer the best illustration of the understanding of quotations proposed by Clark and Gerrig (1990). According to these authors, every quotation is a nonserious action marked as such, or else: a demonstration of somebody's verbal or even nonverbal communication. This understanding is also in line with the view that quotes are “constructed dialogue” […] “because quoters spontaneously construct a replica of what someone else actually said or wrote or, indeed, could have said” (Bublitz, 2015: 7e8). If we add “or could say in the future”, this covers the whole range of fictive quotations in the sense adopted here. With fictive utterances, the myth of verbatim reproduction vanishes automatically. If “direct quotation is generally considered to display the lowest degree of subjectivity” (A. Fetzer, this volume), this does not hold for fictive quotations. They belong to the wide range of fictive interaction (Pascual, 2016; Golato, 2012) with its various shapes and manifold functions. Giving voice to animals, things and even abstract entities is an age-old and omnipresent cultural practice, it is available to children, advertisers, brain-damaged patients, etc. e why should politicians not make use of it? When handled skillfully, the fictive strategy contributes to narrative immediacy. This requires direct speech rather than indirect or mixed speech.9 Fictive quotations also become more effective if they are used to build whole chunks of fictive dialogue. On the other hand, their benefit for argumentative purposes seems less clear: they hardly enhance the credibility of the information quoted, nor the authority of its source and/or the quoter. Nevertheless, in spontaneous conversation “claim-backing” is a widespread function in hypothetical speech, together with modelling discourse for others and humorous stories (Golato, 2012). In the State Duma debates, fictive quotations of single utterances or whole conversational exchanges may anticipate a future utterance or paraphrase a past speech event. They may involve the speakers themselves, other well-known personalities or completely unknown people. They are not always explicitly introduced, but can function as free-standing direct speech. Moreover, they often support another quotation, for example a proverb. Out of the 100 quotations in my sample, 15 are hypothetical. The most prolific author of fictive quotations is the Duma's  entertainer and enfant terrible V. Zirinovskij. In one single speech on 7 November 2007, he manages to use this technique three times. One fragment from this speech is oriented towards the past and mainly denounces the ignorance of Soviet leaders. The content of Reagan's fictive utterance is clearly counterfactual or, in terms of Mayes (1990:336), an “impossible quote”: (6) Этот актёришка Рейган в Рейкьявике одно попросил у Горбачёва: убери советский режим, режим - не страну, не экономику, не армию, только режим убери, десоветизацию проведи, пусть будет не Верховный Совет, а Государственная Дума, не ЦК КПСС, а администрация президента, всё! А этот ставропольский мужичишка что сделал? С Ельциным всю страну вообще убрали, всю армию убрали, всю экономику! Вот в чём причина - причина в генетическом коде. Пока там профессора, а здесь шариковы, мы будем в дураках. Там - отличники, здесь - двоечники. That lousy actor Reagan asked Gorba cev only for one thing in Reykjavik: remove the Soviet regime e the regime, [I say,] not the whole country nor its economy nor the army, remove only the regime, bring about a desovietization, let there be the State Duma instead of the Supreme Soviet, the President’s administration instead of the Central Committee of the CPSU, and that’s it! But what did that lousy guy from Stavropol’ do? Together with El’cin he destroyed the whole country, the whole army, the whole economy! The reason lies in the genetic code. As long as the professors are there and the  Sarikovs are here, we will be let down. The straight-A students are there, here are the flunkeys. In this narrative, Soviet protagonists react to a fictive American request, but overdo it out of sheer stupidity. The illusion of dialogicity is enhanced by the adjacency pair “What did that lousy guy from Stavropol’ (¼Gorba cev) do? He destroyed…”.  Sarikov is a character from Bulgakov's novel Sobac’e serdce (The heart of a dog), a former dog named  Sarik turned human by a professor but remaining stupid. The plural sarikovy is deonymized. The whole episode serves only to buttress the conclusion that Soviet leaders were incompetent and today's Russian leaders continue to be losers. This is coherent with a previous passage, in which the speaker had warned against Russian illusions about the US and Europe. The verdict is supported by a fictive historical argument from example and a double allusive argument from figurative analogy (professors,  Sarikovs).10 The

17 Premises about individuals and conclusions about groups or whole nations as in the given case create a gap in the argument (Fallacy of Composition). However, such a gap can be bridged by attributing intentions to the group due to interactions between its members (Govier 2009), which was the intention of the Duma resolution. 9 For a systematic comparison of fictive and ordinary direct quotation see Pascual (2016: 54e56). 10 Ascribing a half animal status to Russians is undoubtedly not very flattering but actually targets the Soviet system (embodied by  Sarikov, the representative of the new class) so deeply hated by the speaker.

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Russian terms otlicnik and dvoecnik in the last sentence originally denoted excellent and bad pupils but have long become conventional metaphors; they are semantically linked with the preceding opposition ‘professors vs. sarikovs.’ S In the following case, a communist deputy is criticizing both sides for their conflict management in the dispute about the Russian gas deliveries to Ukraine (note that this took place long before the outburst of the military conflict): (7) Виновато ворьё России и Украины, которое не поделило между собой маржу до нового года. Российским было обидно отдавать столь много украинским, украинские не пожелали упустить своё - в итоге коса нашла на камень. Российские: "Ах, вы не хотите отдавать больше, мы тогда у вас заберём всю маржу, а вы будете покупать газ по мировым ценам". Украинские: "Ах, вы так, а мы вам задвижки закроем". И закрыли. Вследствие этого бюджет и народ России понесли от этих маржевателей огромные убытки. Responsible are the Russian and Ukrainian thieves who did not share their profit margins before the new year. The Russians were reluctant to give back so much to the Ukrainians, the Ukrainians did not want to resign from their share. As a result, the scythe hit the rock. The Russians: “OK, you don’t want to give back more, so we will take your profit margin and you will buy the gas at the global price.” The Ukrainians: “OK, you’ll do that, and we will shut your pipeline lockings.” And they shut them. As a result, the Russian budget and the Russian people suffered enormous losses because of those profiteers. N.F. Rjabov, 21 February 2009 The proverb ‘the scythe hit the rock’ is based on a figurative analogy and means ‘two intransigent (and equally strong) adversaries met each other’ or, in other words, a case of ‘diamond cut diamond’. In the given context, it triggers the implicature: “neither of the adversaries can win in such a situation”, which provides the generalization11 underlying the fictive narration. The subsequent dialogue between the adversaries is rendered with zero quotatives, a typical device in hypothetical discourse (Golato 2012: 30). At first glance, it does not add a new argument but simply rephrases the speaker's previous description of the state of affairs. Yet, there resonates a lexicalized marker of a ‘tit for tat’ strategy in it: Russian “Ax, vy tak, a my vam…” often recurs in children literature and in Soviet political jokes. Thus, it confers a childish and humorous ring to the example at hand: both parties act like little children. The type of allusive analogy involved here relates to a whole class or genre of texts rather than to one single text (see also Thielemann, this volume). The case is comparable to a speech  delivered by Zirinovskij on 12 September 2012, a mocking goodbye to deputy G. Gudkov, who had been excluded from the Duma (see example 2). Since it contained several formulae typical of an obituary, the source of the quotation was a whole genre.  Example (8) relates to the current Ukraine conflict and is based on a different-domain analogy. In a TV debate, Zirinovskij criticizes a new bill that assigns a particular status to certain parts of the separatist regions Doneck and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine: (8) Закон вредный и издевательский. Вот приблизительно так: Врач говорит: «Ты можешь локоть помыть и пятку одну. Все остальное мы тебе не разрешаем. У тебя есть право вот только на отдельные небольшие части твоего тела». это же идиотизм! This law is harmful and a provocation. Approximately like this: The doctor says: “You may wash your elbow and one heel. We do not allow you to wash anything else. You have only the right to some minor parts of your body.” That’s an idiocy!  V. Zirinovskij, “Vremja poka zet”, Channel 1, 16 September 2014 The comparison is announced by tak ‘like this’, followed by a quotative (‘says’). The figurative analogy between body parts and territorial parts serves as the only argument that supports the two negative evaluations surrounding it. The absurdity is boosted by the fact that it is uttered by a physician, who deserves to be trusted as an authority, and by the bizarre idea that such an elementary process as washing should affect only two minor body parts. To sum up, in all examples analyzed in this section the fictive arguments served to motivate a negative evaluation. One argument sought to discredit the bill under discussion by ridiculing it by an absurd analogy (doctor allowing to wash only certain body parts). The remaining ones were related to past events (Reagan's meeting with Gorba cev, the gas price dispute), whose actors likewise became the object of derision. It goes without saying that fictive communication, be it based on analogy or not, does not increase the “credentializing function” (Bublitz, 2015: 12) nor the quoter's authority. For instance, it does not allow any boasting about one's profound knowledge of the source. Within rational argumentation, it fulfils a supportive function at best. Not coincidentally, in example (7) it accompanied another quotation (a proverb) that rendered an uncontestable message. On the other hand, fictive communication allows engaging partners in  a pseudo-dialogue that never took place (recall Zirinovskij's Western e Russian fictive exchanges). Moreover, fictive arguments fulfil important interpersonal functions, such as entertainment and the delegitimization of the enemy. They thus mainly serve as a rhetorical device.

11 Formally, this proverb describes a single event in the past. Nevertheless, it serves as a generalization, much as the majority of proverbs do that are based on a hidden conditional period ‘If p, then q’.

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5. Arguing with quoted proverbs As figurative analogies in general (see Section 2.1), proverbs in particular pose a challenge to argumentation theory (Goodwin and Wenzel, 1979): as part of received folk wisdom, they are seldom subject to contestation since the meaning of proverbs is known to everybody, therefore they do not invite evaluations of the analogy (Kienpointner, 2012) and opponents do not question this analogy. Yet, this does not always hold true. Some stereotypes rendered by proverbs do provoke criticism as in the following quotation from the debate about the war on Georgia: (9) Мы же всегда ждём. Это дурацкая российская поговорка: "Русский мужик медленно запрягает...". Пока медленно запрягаем, будем хоронить. Быстро нужно всё делать, за двадцать четыре часа! We always wait. That stupid Russian proverb: “The Russian peasant always harnesses the horses slowly, [but then rides quickly].” As long as we will be harnessing slowly, we will bury people. All should be done quickly, within 24 hours!  Zirinovskij V.V., 25 August 2008 Truncations of the original proverb such as the one illustrated here (“Русский мужик медленно зацрягает ...”) are generally more frequent than full quotations; moreover, in the given case the full version would even be detrimental to the speaker's argument. The proverb provides a negative analogy: the undesirable practical consequence (too many casualties) of the proverbial Russian attitude urges us to act in the opposite way and not hesitate any longer. The next quotation does not stem from parliament but from a radio discussion on Russian nationalism: (10) Это дикое поле, дикий хаос, законы тайги, медведь, как президент сказал, медведь в тайге хозяин - это прямой путь к войне всех против всех и к распаду. Я, естественно, категорически против такого пути, я считаю, что людей делает людьми, цивилизацию делает цивилизацией уважение к праву, уважение к взятым на себя обязательствам. That’s the wild plain, the wild chaos, the laws of the Tajga, a bear, as our president said, the bear is the lord of the Tajga e that’s the direct way to a war of all against all and to decay. Of course, I am categorically against such a way, I think what makes people human, what makes a civilization a civilization is the respect of the law, the respect of the duties one has taken over. V. Ry zkov, Radio Svoboda, 4 November 201412 The structure of this intertextual reference is more complex than in the preceding case since it displays a two-level quotation.13 The original version may be traced back to the GULAG folklore: “Zakon e tajga, medved’ хozjain” ‘The law is the tajga, the bear is the lord’. It means roughly ‘the stronger is always right, there is no sense talking about justice’. This conceptualization reveals a metaphorical mapping: tajga ¼> human society, bear ¼> strong leader. Putin's contextualization (24 October 2014), which referred to the annexation of the Crimea, identifies the bear metonymically with Russia. The current speaker, himself a liberal and former Duma deputy, denounces this adaptation as a fatal mistake. The proverb again serves as a negative analogy, where the quoter disaligns with both the original and the second (Putin) source. Interestingly, he does not reject the analogy itself (‘Our state is not the wildеrness of the tajga’) but points to its disastrous consequences and then presents his own view on the essence of modern statehood. Sometimes a proverb undergoes a creative transformation. In the following case, the main aggressor in our collection of examples receives justice at last: (11) Говорят, у многих людей слово d воробей. У Жириновского слово d это ворона с расстроенным желудком, она кружит над этим залом и гадит на головы сидящих (сильный шум, гул в зале), на историю, на исторических деятелей, на основателей Российского государства, на живых и мёртвых, выполняя, конечно, определённый политический заказ...  They say of many people that their word is a sparrow. Zirinovskij’s word is a crow with a disordered stomach, it circles above this chamber and defecates on the heads of those who are seated (strong noise, roar in the auditory), on history, on historical politicians, on the founders of the Russian state, on those living and dead, of course executing somebody’s political order. I. Nikitcuk, 4 September 2013 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼vAOYXtIrSXs In its original version, this proverb is negated: Slovo d ne vorobej, meaning ‘A word is not a sparrow that will fly away and you won't catch it’ with the frozen implicature “Therefore mind your words!”. The affirmative version attested here has also become conventionalized; it characterizes people whose words do fly away.14 One finds even the altered version Slovo e

12

https://www.svoboda.org/a/26673603.html, accessed on 19 July 2019. The quoter resumes a quotation a previous author had already quoted from the original source. Putin often acts as the intermediate link of such stacked quotations: in Weiss (2016a:209) he appears even in a three-level quote. 14 This version featured, for instance, the heading of a post that informed about the possibility of deleting a message already sent on Whatsapp:https://m. pikabu.ru/story/slovo__vorobey_5497970, accessed on 23 May 2018. 13

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vorobej, vyletit e pojmaes’ ‘A word is a sparrow: when it flies away, you'll catch it’.15 The current speaker, a communist deputy  who had since long been complaining about Zirinovskij's constant denigration of the Soviet past, now inserts the individual  author of the word (Zirinovskij), replaces the sparrow with the negatively connotated co-hyponym ‘crow’ and assigns to it a disgusting characteristics that affects the whole audience and provides an additional analogy (diarrhea: logorrhea). The sparrow analogy thus undergoes a substantial transformation: not only does the target display symptoms of pathological logorrhea, but his verbal mud (metonymically attributed to the word) offends the whole House. The allusion to a foreign (whose?) order in the subsequent text seems to suggest that the stomach disorder is controllable. While the accused launched a furious rejoinder 10 min length, he did not comment on the analogy itself.16

6. Concluding remarks The overview of problems presented in this study allows us to conclude that quotations are a not a suitable stimulus for analogical argumentation since they almost never trigger counterarguments. In the case of “fresh” quotations, this is explainable by the additional cognitive effort required for the decoding of the message: the identification of the source, the reconstruction of possibly missing strings of text and of the whole background of the quoted original, the recognition of the analogy intended e let alone additional implicit analogies that are hidden in the reference to the source (Section 3) e leave little space for questioning the analogy itself. The authority of the source often is an additional obstacle. Thus, neither the relevance of the highlighted shared properties nor the validity of the original message are discussed. An alternative challenge would be a counter-quote. However, such a repartee requires an exceptionally erudite mind and is not attested in my data. Fictive quotations (Section 4) are by definition not known to anybody, therefore they are not affected by most obstacles that hamper the decoding of other “fresh” quotes. Yet, even they never provoke a critical assessment of the analogy involved. In the case of “canned” quotations (proverbs, aphorisms, slogans, etc.), the cognitive “detour” cannot be the reason for the missing echo. Most of the examples in this category are stereotyped vehicles of received folk wisdom that do not provoke any dissent: as stereotypes in general, they serve as comfortable cognitive short-cuts that facilitate decision-making. On the other hand, they may be criticized for propagating undesirable attitudinal biases: this was the case in examples (9) and (10), where the quoter negatively evaluated the analogy and in (10) even presented a counterargument. Counter-proverbs would serve the same purpose but are not attested in my sample. In example (11) the quoter also did not slavishly accept the analogy but transformed it into a creative double analogy. Thus, in the whole sample, analogies were attacked there where this was to be least expected: in proverbs. However, it should be emphasized that the proverb in (10) does not reflect the traditional order of a rural society but the rules of modern social outcasts, hence its highly controversial statement. If argumentation from analogy is not the essence of the quotations examined in this study, what other purposes do they serve? As has been pointed out above, they offer a range of additional effects that seem more rewarding than the argumentative purpose. As for the quoter's self-positioning between source and target of the analogy, all four possible combinations were found: ± alignment with the source and ± support of the target, the most frequent combination being þ source, -target; in some cases the quoter both aligns with one deputy and disaligns with other deputies. Besides the relevance of arguments from authority, these findings corroborate the importance of the delegitimization of the opponent or the discreditation of a bill: the polemical strategy, effective in 86% of all cases (see Section 2.1), turns out to be the principal raison ^tre of the analogical quotations analyzed. In many contexts, quotes also produce humoristic or other entertaining effects. d’e Fictive quotations provide a particularly suitable strategy to achieve this by enabling the speaker to create imaginary dialogic scenarios and rearrange whole political constellations. Self-staging thus becomes another driving force of humorous and fictive quotations. As shown in Section 3, in more consensus-oriented contexts the analogies used may also create common ground as a prerequisite for reconciliation. There remain several open questions that merit to be tackled on a larger sample of quotations. Among them may be mentioned the distinction between “fresh” and “canned” quotations, which calls for a graded understanding ( Weiss, 2016a:194e197). Another open issue concerns the recognizability of a formally altered (truncated, partially rephrased etc.) “canned” quote (ibidem). Other problems relate rather to analogical arguments in general, notably the distinctions between same-domain vs. different-domain analogies and figurative vs. metaphorical analogies: the boundary dividing these pairs is not always clear-cut and may also be conceived of as gradual (Doury, 2009: 145, Xu and Wu, 2014: 3).

Funding information The research leading to these results has received funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (Schweizerischer €rderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung), grant agreement No. 100015 14068, 2011e2014. Nationalfonds zur Fo

15 This was targeted at the new government of Armenia, whose unexperienced ministers spent whole days apologizing for their absurd public statements: http://shame.am/ru/news/view/66099.html, accessed on 23 May 2018. 16 ¼http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼Ln8mfExJ9js, accessed on accessed on 23 May 2018.

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Mayes, Patricia, 1990. Quotation in spoken English. Stud. Lang. 14 (2), 325e363. Musolff, Andreas, 2004. Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Musolff, Andreas, 2016. Metaphor scenario analysis as part of cultural linguistics. Tekst i dyskurs 9 (2016), 47e69. Pascual, Esther, 2016. Fictive Interaction. The Conversational Frame in Thought, Language, and Discourse. John Benjamins, Amsterdam-Philadelphia. Ribeiro, Henrique J. (Ed.), 2014. Systematic Approaches to Argument by Analogy. Springer International Publishing Switzerland. n ~ ez, Cristia n, 2010. Metaphors and argumentation: the case of Chilean parliamentarian media participation. J. Pragmat. 42 (4), 973e989. Santiba Walton, Douglas N., Reed, C., Macagno, F., 2008. Argumentation Schemes. Cambridge: University Press, Cambridge. van Eemeren, F., Grootendorst, R., 2004. A systematic theory of argumentation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Walton, Douglas N., 2014. Argumentation schemes for argument from analogy. In: Ribeiro, Henrique J. (Ed.), Systematic Approaches to Argument by Analogy. 23-40. Springer International Publishing Switzerland. Wilson, Deirdre, 2012. Metarepresentation in linguistic communication. In: Wilson, Deirdre, Sperber, Dan (Eds.), Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 230e258. Xu, Cihua, Wu, Yicheng, 2014. Metaphors in the perspective of argumentation. J. Pragmat. 62, 68e76. Daniel Weiss is Professor emeritus. He held chairs of Slavic Linguistics in Hamburg, Munich and Zurich. The largest research project he directed was devoted to the analysis of verbal propaganda in Soviet Union and the Polish People's Republic. His current research in contemporary Russian and Polish political discourse focuses on implicit communicative strategies, including types and functions of quotations, impoliteness management, figurative language (metaphor, metonymy, irony) as well as on competing legitimization discourses in the Ukraine conflict. He has published many articles on political discourse and acted as editor of two edited volumes in this domain.