Constructing social norms: The pragmatics of multimodal quotation boundaries in spoken Swahili

•Direct quotations were analyzed in naturally occurring talk in Swahili.•Quotation boundaries have a distinctive pragmatic function.•Unattributed direct quotations regularly include bald directives.•Unattributed quoted directives is a means for constructing social norms.

The article examines the pragmatic meaning of direct quotation boundaries in Swahili. The application of conversation and discourse analysis to naturally occurring talk in media settings reveals that by avoiding reporting verbs, speakers manage to create an imagined participant framework involving co-present participants in a hypothetical dialog between ‘me’ and ‘you,’ which becomes an appropriate context for imperative verbs. In Searlean terms, these imperative verbs have a twofold function, namely the function of bald directives and of indirect representative speech acts. Speakers employ multimodal resources to signal to co-participants the pragmatic value of these speech acts. The coordinated use of verbally unframed quotations with imperative verbs proves to be a strategy with which Swahili speakers display their epistemic authority. By so doing, Swahili speakers are able to represent a personal stance as a societal moral norm and to contribute to the construction of social normativity through media discourse.