Cover not available
Article published In:
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 23:1 (2022) ► pp.29–53

Who’s speaking for whom?

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

ORCID logo | Nanjing Tech University
ORCID logo | Shanghai International Studies University
 | Zhejiang University
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 2006, 2014). We analyse rhetorical questions as constructions of intersubjectivity (see Verhagen 2005, 2008), involving not just a conceptual integration of question and assertion but also a viewpoint blend (Dancygier and Sweetser [eds] 2012). 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.
Keywords: fictive interaction, intersubjectivity, rhetorical questions, the Zhuangzi , viewpoint blending
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
Published online: 10 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.18013.xia
References (87)
References
Adams, Jim W. 2006. The Performative Nature and Function of Isaiah 40–55. New York: T & T Clark International.Google Scholar
Badarneh, Muhammad A. 2003. The Rhetorical Question as a Discursive and Stylistic Device in the Quran. (Unpublished PhD thesis.) Arizona State University.
Bisang, Walter. 2008. “Underspecification and the Noun/Verb Distinction: Late Archaic Chinese and Khmer”. In Anita Steube (ed.), The Discourse Potential of Underspecified Structures, 55–81. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
. 2013. “Word-Class Systems Between Flexibility and Rigidity: An Integrative Approach”. In Jan Rijkhoff and Eva van Lier (eds), Flexible Word Classes: Typological Studies of Underspecified Parts of Speech, 275–302. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bowery, Anne-Marie. 2007. “Know Thyself: Socrates as Storyteller”. In Gary Alan Scott (ed.), Philosophy in Dialogue: Plato’s Many Devices, 82–110. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Puqing. 1983. Zhongguo Gudai Yuyanshi [‘ A History of Fables in Ancient China ’]. Changsha: Hunan Education Press.Google Scholar
Chen, Xiaohe, Feng Minxuan, Xu Runhua, et al. 2013. Xianqin Wenxian Xinxi Chuli [‘ Information Processing of Pre-Qin Texts ’]. Beijing: World Books Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Chou, Fa-kao. 1961. Zhongguo Gudai Yufa Zaoju Bian Shang [‘ A Historical Grammar of Ancient Chinese Part 1: Syntax ’]. Taipei: Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica.Google Scholar
Claridge, C. 2005. “Questions in Early Modern English Pamphlets”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6 (1): 133–168. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Classe, Olive. 2000. Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English: A-L. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Conrad, Rudi. 1982. “Rhetorische Fragen” [‘Rhetorical Questions’]. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 27 (3): 420–428. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cooren, François. 2010. Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation and Ventriloquism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2012. “Communication Theory at the Center: Ventriloquism and the Communicative Constitution of Reality”. Journal of Communication 62 (1): 1–20. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coulson, Seana. 2005. “Sarcasm and the Space Structuring Model”. In Seana Coulson and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (eds), The Literal and Nonliteral in Language and Thought, 129–144. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Coutinho, Steve. 2016. Zhuangzi and Early Chinese Philosophy: Vagueness, Transformation and Paradox. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Creel, Herrlee Glessner. 1970. What is Taoism? and Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara. 2008. “Personal Pronouns, Blending, and Narrative Viewpoint”. In Andrea Tyler, Yiyoung Kim and Mari Takada (eds), Language in the Context of Use: Discourse and Cognitive Approaches to Language, 167–183. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara and Eve Sweetser (eds). 2012. Viewpoint in Language: A Multimodal Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara, Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen (eds). 2016. Viewpoint and the Fabric of Meaning. Form and Use of Viewpoint Tools across Languages and Modalities. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Estes, Douglas. 2013. The Questions of Jesus in John: Logic, Rhetoric and Persuasive Discourse. Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017. Questions and Rhetoric in the Greek New Testament: An Essential Reference Resource for Exegesis. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1994. “Conversationalization of Public Discourse and the Authority of the Consumer”. In Nicholas Abercrombie, Russell Keat and Nigel Whiteley (eds), The Authority of the Consumer, 253–268. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. 1996. “Blending as a Central Process of Grammar”. In Adele Goldberg (ed.), Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, 113–129. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Frank, Jane. 1990. “You Call That a Rhetorical Question? Forms and Functions of Rhetorical Questions in Conversation”. Journal of Pragmatics 14 (5): 723–738. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fraser, Bruce. 1998. “Contrastive Discourse Markers in English”. In Andreas H. Jucker and Yael Ziv (eds), Discourse Markers: Descriptions and Theory, 301–326. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fung, Yu-lan. 1997 (1948). A Short History of Chinese Philosophy. (Edited by David Bodde.) New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
. 1983. A History of Chinese Philosophy. (Volume 1: The Period of the Philosophers (from the Beginnings to circa 100 B.C .) (Translated by David Bodde.) Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Galambos, Imre. 2014. “Punctuation Marks in Medieval Chinese Manuscripts”. In Jörg Quenzer, Dmitry Bondarev and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (eds), Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, 341–357. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grèssillon, Almuth. 1980. “Zum Linguistischen Status Rhetorischer Fragen” [‘On the Linguistic Status of Rhetorical Questions’]. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 8 (3): 273–289. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guo, Qingfan. 2013 (1894). Zhuangzi Jishi [‘ Collected Interpretations of the Zhuangzi ’]. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company.Google Scholar
Günther, Franziska. 2016. Constructions in Cognitive Contexts: Why Individuals Matter in Linguistic Relativity Research. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Han, Chung-hye. 2002. “Interpreting Interrogatives as Rhetorical Questions”. Lingua 112 (3): 201–229. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harvard-Yenching Institute. 1956. Zhuangzi Yinde [‘ A Concordance to Zhuangzi ’]. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Herman, Vimala. 1999. “Deictic Projection and Conceptual Blending in Epistolarity”. Poetics Today 20 (3): 523–541.Google Scholar
Hogan, Patrick C. 2013. How Authors’ Minds Make Stories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huang, Jian. 2013. Sixiang Men: Xianqin Zhuzi Jiedu Zendingben [‘ The Gate of Ideas: Interpreting Pre-Qin Philosophers ’]. (Updated edition.) Shanghai: Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey. K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ilie, Cornelia. 1994. What Else Can I Tell You? A Pragmatic Study of English Rhetorical Questions as Discursive and Argumentative Acts. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.Google Scholar
. 1999. “Question-Response Argumentation in Talk Shows”. Journal of Pragmatics 31 (8): 975–999. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010. “Rhetorical Questions”. In Louise Cummings (ed.), The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia, 405–408. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jaffee, Martin S. 2001. Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 BCE-400 CE. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kiefer, Ferenc. 1980. “Yes-no Questions as Wh-questions”. In John Searle, Ferenc Kiefer and Manfred Bierwisch (eds), Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics, 97–119. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koshik, Irene. 2005. Beyond Rhetorical Questions: Assertive Questions in Everyday Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Krieken, Kobie and José Sanders. 2019. “Smoothly Moving through Mental Spaces: Linguistic Patterns of Viewpoint Transfer in News Narratives”. Cognitive Linguistics 30 (3): 499–529. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 1999. “Virtual Reality”. Studies in Linguistic Sciences 29 (2): 77–103.Google Scholar
2001. “Discourse in Cognitive Grammar”. Cognitive Linguistics 12 (2): 143–188. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013. “Interactive Cognition: Toward a Unified Account of Structure, Processing, and Discourse”. International Journal of Cognitive Linguistics 3 (2): 95–125.Google Scholar
Legge, James (trans). 1891a. The Texts of Taoism, Part 1: The Tāo Teh King; The Writings of Kwang-dze (Books I–XVII). Oxford: The Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
(trans). 1891b. The Texts of Taoism, Part 2: Writings of Kwang-dze (Books XVIII–XXXIII); The Thâi-Shang Tractate of Actions and Their Retributions. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Liu, Xiaogan (ed). 2015. Dao Companion to Daoist Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lin, Xuda. 1981. “Shanggu Hanyu de Yudiao Wenti” [‘Tones in Archaic Chinese’]. Journal of Southwest University (Social Sciences Edition) (2): 107–113.Google Scholar
Mair, Victor. 2000. “The Zhuangzi and its Impact”. In Livia Kohn (ed.), Daoism Handbook, 30–52. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Major, John S. 2014. “Tool Metaphors in the Huainanzi and Other Early Texts”. In Sarah A. Queen and Michael Puett (eds), The Huainanzi and Textual Production in Early China, 151–198. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Meibauer, Jörg. 1986. Rhetorische Fragen [‘ Rhetorical Questions ’]. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nienhauser, William H. 1986. The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature. (Volume 11.) Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Oakley, Todd and Seana Coulson. 2008. “Connecting the Dots: Mental Spaces and Metaphoric Language in Discourse”. In Todd Oakley and Anders Hougaard (eds), Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction, 27–50. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oakley, Todd and Vera Tobin. 2014. “The Whole is Sometimes Less Than the Sum of its Parts: Toward a Theory of Document Acts”. Language and Cognition 6 (1): 79–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pascual, Esther. 2006. “Questions in Legal Monologues: Fictive Interaction as Argumentative Strategy in a Murder Trial”. Text & Talk 26 (3): 383–402. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2008. “Text for Context, Trial for Trialogue: An Enthnographic Study of a Fictive Interaction Blend”. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 6 (1): 50–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014. Fictive Interaction: The Conversation Frame in Thought, Language and Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pascual, Esther and Sergeiy Sandler (eds). 2016. The Conversation Frame: Forms and Functions of Fictive Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pulleyblank, Edwin G. 1995. Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar. Vancouver: UBC Press.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sydney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rosch, Eleanor H. 1973. “Natural Categories”. Cognitive Psychology 4 (3): 328–350. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roth, Harold. 2008. “Zhuangzi”. In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online at: [URL]
Sadock, Jerrold M. 1974. Towards a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Schmidt-Radefeldt, Jürgen. 1977. “On So-Called ‘Rhetorical’ Questions”. Journal of Pragmatics 1 (4): 375–392. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, John R. 1975. “Indirect Speech Acts”. In Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics, 59–82. (Volume 3: Speech Acts .) New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Streeck, Jürgen. 2002. “Grammars, Words, and Embodied Meanings: On the Uses and Evolution of So and Like”. Journal of Communication 52 (3): 581–596. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verhagen, Arie. 2005. Construction of Intersubjectivity: Discourse, Syntax, and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vis, Kirsten, José Sanders and Wilbert Spooren. 2012. “Diachronic Changes in Subjectivity and Stance: A Corpus Linguistic Study of Dutch News Texts”. Discourse, Context and Media 1 (2–3): 95–102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Von der Gabelentz, Georg. 1881. Chinesische Grammatik, Mit Ausschluss des Niederen Stiles und der Heutigen Umgangssprache [‘ Chinese Grammar, Exclusive of Lower Style and Contemporary Colloquial ’]. Leipzig: T.O. WEIGEL.Google Scholar
Wang, Bo. 2013. Zhuangzi Zhexue Di’erban [‘ The Philosophy of Chuang Tzu ’]. (Second edition.) Beijing: Peking University Press.Google Scholar
Wang, Haifen. 2015. Guhanyu Fanchou Cidian: Yiwen Juan [‘ Dictionary of Classical Chinese Categories: Interrogatives ’]. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press.Google Scholar
Wang, Rongpei (trans.). 1999. Zhuangzi. Changsha: Hunan People’s Publishing House & Beijing: Foreign Language Press.Google Scholar
Wang, Shishun and Mujun Han. 1993. Laozhuang Cidian [‘ Dictionary of Laozi and Zhuangzi ’]. Jinan: Shandong Education Press.Google Scholar
Watson, Burton (trans.). 2013 [1968]. The Complete Works of Zhuangzi. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Xiang, Mingjian. 2016. “Real, Imaginary, or Fictive? Philosophical Dialogues in an Early Daoist Text and its Pictorial Version”. In Esther Pascual and Sergeiy Sandler (eds), The Conversation Frame: Forms and Functions of Fictive Interaction, 63–86. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Xiang, Mingjian and Esther Pascual. 2016. “Debate with Zhuangzi: Expository Questions as Fictive Interaction Blends in an Old Chinese Text”. Pragmatics 26 (1): 137–162.Google Scholar
Yang, Guorong. 2017. Zhuangzi de Sixiang Shijie Xiudingban [‘ Zhuangzi’s World of Thought ’] (Revised edition.) Beijing: Sanlian Book Store.Google Scholar
Yang, Bojun and He Leshi. 2001. Guhanyu Yufa Jiqi Fazhan Xiudingban [‘ A Grammar of Ancient Chinese and its Development ’] (Revised edition.) Beijing: YUWEN Publishing House.Google Scholar
Ye, Chengyi. 2004 [1979]. Zhuangzi Yuyan Yanjiu [‘ A Study on Fables in the Zhuangzi ’]. Taipei: Wenshizhe Publishing House.Google Scholar
Zhang, Mosheng. 2007 [1948]. Zhuangzi Xinshi [‘ A New Interpretation of the Zhuangzi ’]. Beijing: New World Press.Google Scholar
Zlatev, Jordan, Timothy P. Racine, Chris Sinha and Esa Itkonen (eds). 2008. The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.