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Article published In: Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 23:1 (2022) ► pp.29–53

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Who’s speaking for whom?

Rhetorical questions as intersubjective mixed viewpoint constructions in an early Daoist text

ORCiD logo with link | Nanjing Tech University
ORCiD logo with link | Shanghai International Studies University
 | Zhejiang University
Published online: 10 October 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.18013.xia
Abstract
This paper deals with rhetorically intended questions in the Zhuangzi, a foundational text of Daoism (fourth century bc). Such questions are generally meant to evoke silent answers in the addressee’s mind, thereby involving a fictive type of interaction (Pascual, Esther. 2006. “Questions in Legal Monologues: Fictive Interaction as Argumentative Strategy in a Murder Trial”. Text & Talk 26 (3): 383–402. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2014. Fictive Interaction: The Conversation Frame in Thought, Language and Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). We analyse rhetorical questions as constructions of intersubjectivity (see Verhagen, Arie. 2005. Construction of Intersubjectivity: Discourse, Syntax, and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2008. “Intersubjectivity and the Architecture of the Language System”. In Jordan Zlatev, Timothy P. Racine, Chris Sinha and Esa Itkonen (eds), The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, 307–331. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), involving not just a conceptual integration of question and assertion but also a viewpoint blend (Dancygier, Barbara and Eve Sweetser (eds). 2012. Viewpoint in Language: A Multimodal Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). They involve fusing the perspectives of the writer, the assumed prospective readers, and possibly also that of the discourse characters (in the case of rhetorical questions ascribed to a discourse character but meant to represent the writer’s voice). In this highly influential text with abundant mixed viewpoint scenarios, the interpretation of rhetorical questions involves the resolution of different viewpoints, which are set up and shifted in a multi-layered manner for particular argumentative purposes.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methodology
  • 3.Rhetorical questions in the Zhuangzi text
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Rhetorical questions in the Grounding Space
    • 4.2Rhetorical questions in the Current Discourse Space
  • 5.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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