This article lends empirical support to the notion that
quoted speech is “constructed dialogue” by exploring
empirically how narratives of personal experience involve creative
performance of locally imaginable personas, rather than accurate
or faithful representation of actual people and their words.
This work examines quotation in narratives of personal experience
as a site where speakers use language pragmatically to enact
socio-culturally locatable identities. Using a corpus of narratives
in which French–Portuguese bilinguals told the same
narratives of personal experience once in each language, it
demonstrates that speakers do not quote more extensively when
recounting experiences in the language in which those events
“originally” occurred. Ultimately, what differs
most in speakers' quotations in French and Portuguese
tellings of the “same event” are the nonequivalent
kinds and ranges of registers in which narrated characters are
quoted. More specifically, speakers are more likely to quote
themselves as speaking or having spoken in creative, marked
registers in French than in Portuguese. This difference in the
registers put in the mouths of quoted characters, in particular
of quoted selves, may point to ways in which these bilinguals'
multiple identities are instantiated within and across their
two languages. More broadly, this work reveals ways in which
all speakers may use narrative not only to describe the past
but also to perform a variety of cultural selves, reinventing
and reenacting characters as quoted selves and others.