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Article published In: Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 23:1 (2022) ► pp.111–145

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Constructionalized rhetorical questions from negatively biased to negation polarity

The case of Hebrew lo mi yodea ma

 | Shenkar College, Israel | Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Published online: 4 October 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.17011.bar
Abstract
How does a rhetorical question become an adverbial npi down-toner? This paper focusses on a specific type of grammaticalization process: the grammaticalization of a rhetorical construction à la Goldberg, Adelle E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, namely, a “constructionalized rhetorical question” (Bardenstein, Ruti. 2018. “Who are You to Go against Lady’s Fingers?” xelkat-lashon 511: 114–135.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) which turns into a down-toning adverbial. The particular focus of this paper is on the Hebrew lo mi yodea ma (‘not who knows what’; i.e., ‘not of high quality/quantity’) which has developed from the constructionalization of two earlier constructions. Initially, the biblical question-phrase mi yodea (‘who knows’) constructionalized as “negatively biased” (Ladusaw, William A. 1996. “Negation and Polarity Items”. In Shalom Lappin (ed.), The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, 321–341. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). This is a rhetorical question, to which the obvious answer is negative, and in our case mi yodea can be interpreted as ‘nobody knows’. Most often, it is the case of “not knowing” what the future holds. Then, once a direct object ma (‘what’) was added, it constructionalized once again into a strengthening/ intensification construction mi yodea ma (‘who knows what’), conveying high quantity/quality. This happened since “not knowing what is to happen” can be interpreted as “anything can happen” and this interpretation was used rhetorically to strengthen one‘s utterance. Lastly, mi yodea ma (‘who knows what’) constructionalized under the scope of the negation operator lo (‘not’), into a versatile down-toning adverbial: lo mi yodea ma. Since it is very difficult to negate a strongly positive construction without implying that a less positive one is to some extent true, this negated construction became a versatile down-toner.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background and terminology
    • 2.1Rhetorical questions
    • 2.2Why use rhetorical questions?
    • 2.3Constructionalization
    • 2.4Chunking/automatisation
    • 2.5Negatively biased questions
    • 2.6Negation, mitigation and default sarcasm
    • 2.7Negative polarity items (npis)
    • 2.8The history of the Hebrew language
  • 3.Methodology and corpora
  • 4.Biblical use of rhetorical questions
  • 5.A diachronic grammaticalization path of lo mi yodea ma: From a “negatively biased” question to an adverbial npi
    • Stage I.Biblical mi yodea (ma) (‘who knows (what)’)
    • Stage II.Rabbinic Hebrew mi yodea ma
    • Stage III.Medieval Hebrew – Early-nineteenth century Hebrew mi yodea ma
    • Stage IV.Revival Hebrew mi yodea ma
    • Stage V.Twentieth century mi yodea ma/lo mi yodea ma
    • Stage VI.Twentieth century lo mi yodea ma
    • Stage VII.Twenty-first century lo mi yodea ma
  • 6.Lo mi yodea ma (‘not of high quality/quantity’) in contemporary Hebrew
  • 7.Lo mi yodea kama (‘not who knows what how much’; i.e., ‘not very (much)’)
    • Stage I
    • Stage II
    • Stage III
    • Stage IV
    • Contemporary Hebrew
  • 8.Twenty-first century lo mi yišma (‘not who will hear’)
  • 9.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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