When the presence of a recorded voice gives prepared speech more flexibility: would-be exchanges between radio journalists and sound-bite quotes

Several recent publications analyzing reported speech in audiovisual media have pointed out the differences in contextualization between, on the one hand, classical instances of reported speech used by journalists and, on the other, recorded quotations. It is particularly interesting to observe how, in the case of recorded quotations, the presence of a voice other than that of the journalist limits the range of anaphoras and argumentative connectors that can come after the quotation. By comparison, segments of reported speech between quotation marks in written papers give the journalist a much greater latitude to complete the sentence. However, recorded quotations also allow the journalists another kind of freedom and this is what this paper is focussing on. Before the recorded sound bite, a presenter may sometimes "borrow" the work of the special correspondent, speaking as if he himself was the initiator of the recorded exchange with an interviewed person. In doing so, he blurs the border between two discursive genres: the live interview and the recorded report. After the recorded quotation, he also frequently makes evaluative comments, or even reacts as if he was engaged in a quasi exchange with the recorded voice. These phenomena can be explained by the presence of the recorded interviewee's voice which triggers dialogic reflexes on the journalist using the quotes. They also create opportunities for complicity with the radio audience. The corpus was selected from the morning programs of the public broadcast France Inter from 2007 to 2017.