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Quoting is all around us. But do we really know what it means? How do people actually quote today, and how did our present systems come about? This book brings together a down-to-earth account of contemporary quoting with an examination of the comparative and historical background that lies behind it and the characteristic way that quoting links past and present, the far and the near. Drawing from anthropology, cultural history, folklore, cultural studies, sociolinguistics, literary studies and the ethnography of speaking, Ruth Finnegan's fascinating study sets our present conventions into cross-cultural and historical perspective. She traces the curious history of quotation marks, examines the long tradition of quotation collections with their remarkable recycling across the centuries, and explores the uses of quotation in literary, visual and oral traditions. The book tracks the changing definitions and control of quoting over the millennia and in doing so throws new light on ideas such as 'imitation', 'allusion', 'authorship', 'originality' and 'plagiarism'.

"Treatments of human communication mostly draw on cognitive and word-centred models to present it as predominantly a matter of words. This, Finnegan argues, seriously underestimates the far-reaching multi-modal qualities of human interconnecting and the senses of touch, olfaction and, above all, audition and vision that we draw on. In an authoritative and readable account, Ruth Finnegan brings together research from linguistic and sensory anthropology, material culture, non-verbal communication, computer-mediated communication, and, strikingly, research on animal communication such as the remarkable gesture systems of great apes. She draws on her background in classical studies and her long anthropological experience, to present illuminating examples from throughout the world, past and present. The result is to uncover an amazing array of sounds, sights, smells, gestures, looks, movements, touches and material objects used by humans to interconnect both nearby and across space and time She goes on to explore, first, the extra-sensory modes of communication now being revealed in the extraordinary 'new science' research, and, then, in an incendiary conclusion, to deny the long-prevailing story of human history by questioning whether orality really came before literacy; whether it was really through 'the acquisition of language' that our prehistoric cave painting ancestors made a sudden leap into being 'true humans'; and finally, astonishingly, to ask whether human communicating had its first roots not, after all, in verbal language but - something else. Not to be missed, this highly original book brings a fresh perspective on, among other things, that central topic of interest today - the dawn of human history - and on what being homo sapiens really means. This revised and updated edition has additional illustrations, updated chapters, and a new concluding chapter. A provocative and controversial account that will stir worldwide debate, this book is an essential transdisciplinary overview for researchers and advanced students in language and communication, anthropology and cultural studies"--