A question of time? Question types and speech act shifts from a historical-contrastive perspective

Abstract

Our paper on question types and speech act shifts has a twofold aim. Firstly, we want to combine the perspective of contrastive pragmatics with a historical dimension in order to analyse the speech act of asking a question and speech act shifts from a cross-linguistic historical perspective. The premise is that speech acts change and that speech acts described in texts are therefore understood differently at different times. Secondly, in order to document illocutionary changes and shifts we make use of translation studies and determine possible changes via a comparison between the original text and its translations.Our study has the following structure. After introducing the concept of historical pragmatics and discussing some crossroads between historical and contrastive pragmatics (1) we link both disciplines with the field of translation studies (2). Based on this theoretical framework we demonstrate the relevance of historical pragmatics for translation practice by looking at two examples of historical texts -one from Old Spanish and one from Middle English -and their various modern translations. In the Old Spanish Cantar de mio Cid (3) we focus on question types and ask whether the medieval text presents question types which are not asked any longer. In our second text, Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale (4), we analyse two examples of speech act shift portrayed in the various translations of this historical text and discuss possible motivations for the illocutionary shift in two of the translations given.

Cortesía verbal y competencia lingüística: la petición cortés como tradición discursiva

“…No se trata de cubrir un déficit de información, sino de una volición cortés del hablante para pedirle algo al destinatario (Jung/Schrott 2003: 249-250, House 1997. En inglés se usa la tradición idiomática de la interrogación parcial para sugerirle al destinatario la inferencia de que no hay ninguna razón para negarse a realizar la acción indicada en la proposición.…”

Rhetorical questions or rhetorical uses of questions?

“…Similarly, Jung & Schrott (2003) state that RQs are neither bound to a specific language nor to specific linguistic structures -whether a question is rhetorical or not depends on the context. 6 On the other hand, Schmidt-Radefeldt (1977) lists two types of RQs whose form is indicative of their rhetorical nature -autoresponsive RQs (questions that include an answer) and implicative RQs (questions whose answer is obvious even outside the context due to the general knowledge of interlocutors).…”