Introduction

Jim W. Adams, The Performative Dimensions of Rhetorical Questions in the Hebrew Bible: Do you not know? Do you not hear? (London & NY: T&T Clark, 2020).

Adams’ Performative Dimensions builds on decades of work on rhetorical questions in the philosophy of language and its adoption by Biblical Hebrew scholarship. Rather than pursue the rather elementary - though necessary - acknowledgement of the existence of rhetorical questions and their rhetorical and literary effects in the biblical text, Adams seeks to situate rhetorical questions within the category of interrogatives in general, before honing in on a more precise understanding of their nature and implicatures from a philosophy of language and pragmatic perspective. In this sense, Adams asserts, “RQs general fall within the category of Closed interrogatives and more narrowly within the Biased interrogative type in distinction to Neutral interrogatives. With the former, addressers use interrogatives to express their belief and thus only accept one particular answer as the correct one” (6).

Summary

Within the field of speech acts, Adams' goal is to tackle RQs as a type of indirect speech act, which he beings by defining as follows: “In a basic sense, ISAs are single linguistic sentences that contain two meanings simultaneously with one being intended” (9)

RQs, rather than information-eliciting, are understood as information-providing… however "there are uninformative RQs as well” (7). In order to overcome this initial theoretical snag, Adams argues: “The addresser indirectly implies her/his commitment to the exclusive answer to the RQ while excluding all other possible answers with the expectation that the addressee recognizes and agrees with this inferred commitment” (12). However, even when the RQ is informative, another problem arises when the addressee is same person as the addresser. The proposed solution here involves self-involved stance-taking and confession. Such is the case when the psalmist begins Ps 27 with:

יְהוָ֤ה ׀ אוֹרִ֣י וְ֭יִשְׁעִי

מִמִּ֣י אִירָ֑א

יְהוָ֥ה מָֽעוֹז־חַ֝יַּ֗י

מִמִּ֥י אֶפְחָֽד׃

The performative dimensions thus come into play when the speaker declares his/her willingness to commit to the truth of the understood answer. In this sense, self-directed RQs serve as a stance-taking confession and owning the responsibility of the scope of the entailed information. In the case of a written ancient text, then, as readers we are invited to share in the confession, recite it and own it for ourselves. In response to the question, מִמִּ֣י אִירָ֑א, the reader is invited to confess with the author: I will fear no one! How, though, does this literally-encoded question amount to an assertion? This it the theoretical question to which Adams dedicates the central part of his book.

Key Arguments

Before exploring other examples from the Hebrew Bible, Adams spend, it must be said, an extensive number of pages (162 to be precise) on the analysis of RQs within the realm of Indirect Speech Acts (ISAs), with the goals of “providing some additional criteria for identifying an interrogative as a RQ along with other similar types of interrogatives” and “providing a framework for understanding RQs as types of ISAs while at the same time present[ing] some of the primary ways language specialists conceptualize the nature of ISAs and how addressees interpret them” (19). In the vein of the latter-stated goal: after an overview of the history of philosophy of language, a re-run of the debate regarding the semantics-pragmatics interface…

Adams sets out to answer three primary questions:

What is the relationship between implicatures and speech acts?
How many illocutionary forces are expressed with a single indirect type utterance?
How does a literal linguistic form express an indirect illocutionary force and how do addressees successfully recognize that force?

He arrives at his position: “How many illocutionary forces are expressed with a single indirect utterance? Two IAs are expressed with a typical indirect type of utterance: an intended IA is conveyed through the performance of a literal IA. The intended inferred IA is no an actual IA, but interpretively expresses the force of an IA; it counts as an IA… Both IAs, the literal meaning and the intended implicature, remain possible meanings with one being the most plausible and natural determined by both its linguistic form and cooperative communicative context… With this model, the intended indirect meaning derives from the linguistic form of an utterance, but at the same time the literal semantic meaning and the derived meaning are processed in parallel, and compete with no privileged status for either. The literal meaning triggers possible associatively derived meanings and based on the immediate communicative context one derived meaning is chosen with the others as well as the literal meaning suppressed.” (121) In short, “What licenses interrogatives to operate as felicitous RQs is that both communicative participants share a specific knowledge about the other’s beliefs and values regarding the real world” (187).

Adams proposes the following flow of analysis (quoted in full from pp. 167-168):

1. Literal Illocutionary Interrogative (what is said): Addressers use a literal force of an interrogative that prompts addressees to provide a contextually appropriate answer.

2. Inferred Illocutionary Answer: Addressers imply an intended, exclusive answer which addressees infer from the literal interrogative, pragmatic processes and contextual factors.

Implicature aspect (what is implicated): Addressees recognize that the interrogative violates the immediate contextual communicative principles and rules which prompts inferential, pragmatic processes.
Intentional Meaning aspect (what is meant): Addressees infer the intended, exclusive answer which counts as an IA and communicatively cooperates within the immediate conversation.

3. Perlocutionary Effects

Initial Perlocutionary goal: Addressee’s acknowledgement and understanding of what the inferred IA means and specifically the intended implications of agreeing with the obvious answer.
Intended Perlocutionary goal: Addressee’s agreement and commitment to the inferred IA with its accompanied stances and entailments [end quote]

Other attractive theoretical positions or helpful definitions throughout the discussion include:

The idea that constatives (descriptive) and performatives (doing something) are found along a continuum (35)
The idea that illocutionary acts are central to the utterance and perlocutionary effects are secondary, being dependent upon the illocutionary acts and not vice verse, with the addressees actually being responsible for the intended perlocutionary effects (39-40)
“idioms are idiosyncratic to speech communities whereas ISAs translate linguistically across numerous languages and thus cannot be considered idioms in a proper sense” (46)
That the answer to a RQ is necessarily known is a misconception. The answer is inferable, and may be either known or not (144)
There are degrees of informativity of RQs, the less informative the easier to identify its rhetorical function (184)

Important Concepts (primarily from Grice's Conversational Analysis)

Conventional Implicatures: Attached by convention to lexical items and/or linguistic, grammatical constructions.


[Conversational Implicatures]: Deduced from what is communicated, not necessarily from sentence-meaning.
  + [Generalized Conversational Implicatures]: Conveyed by certain forms of word in an utterance.
  + [Particularized Conversational Implicatures]: Rely on "special features" of the context.

Worked Application

Ps 71:19:

וְצִדְקָתְךָ֥ אֱלֹהִ֗ים עַד־מָ֫ר֥וֹם

אֲשֶׁר־עָשִׂ֥יתָ גְדֹל֑וֹת

אֱ֝לֹהִ֗ים מִ֣י כָמֽוֹךָ׃

YHWH’s uniqueness is celebrated through the persuasive force of the RQ, simultaneously challenging the Lord to act and the psalmist himself to trust solely in the Lord for deliverance (cf. Ps 35:10). RQs regarding YHWH’s incomparability are evidently not very informative, so they are high in rhetoric force (cf. Pss 77:14, 88:11-13, 113:5-6).

Ps 8:2 (& v.10):

יְהוָ֤ה אֲדֹנֵ֗ינוּ מָֽה־אַדִּ֣יר שִׁ֭מְךָ בְּכָל־הָאָ֑רֶץ

Framing Ps 8 with this exclamative declaration in interrogative form. The psalmist’s “affective response concerning Yahweh’s name implicates that it reaches an extreme degree of magnificence comparatively greater than any other alternative names and/or deities under consideration” (233-234). Right in the middle of the psalm we find another exclamative in the form of an interrogative: מָֽה־אֱנ֥וֹשׁ כִּֽי־תִזְכְּרֶ֑נּוּ וּבֶן־אָ֝דָ֗ם כִּ֣י תִפְקְדֶֽנּוּ׃, whereby the “psalmist self-reflectively expresses a strong self-involving assertion and thereby takes the stance that humanity is insignificant and frail with the derived entailments of humility and gratitude” (238; cf. Ps 144:3-4).

Returning to Ps 27, We know the question מִמִּ֣י אִירָ֑א in v. 1 is not genuine since v. 3 explicitly states, לֹֽא־יִירָ֪א לִ֫בִּ֥י, by which “the psalmist commits to not fearing in the face of an encamped enemy” (245). In the intended performance and recitation of the psalm invites self-involved listeners to commit themselves to the same stance and become co-confessors that they, too, will turn to Yahweh in the face of adversity. The RQs of v. 1 with their Directive entailments then form an inclusio for the entire psalm, with the more direct exhortations of v. 14, to קַוֵּ֗ה אֶל־יְה֫וָ֥ה חֲ֭זַק וְיַאֲמֵ֣ץ לִבֶּ֑ךָ וְ֝קַוֵּ֗ה אֶל־יְהוָֽה׃, perhaps primarily as self-exhortation, and subsequently as an invitation for readers/hearers of the psalm to adopt the same perspective and attitude.

Reviews

Katherine E Southwood, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 72, Issue 2, October 2021, Pages 894–896, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flab097 Published: 31 October 2021; https://academic.oup.com/jts/article-abstract/72/2/894/6414886

Beat Weber, Afet Rezensionen; Ausgabe 2021-10 https://www.academia.edu/59147297/Review_of_Jim_W_Adams_The_Performative_Dimensions_of_Rhetorical_Questions_in_the_Hebrew_Bible_Do_You_Not_Know_Do_You_Not_Hear_LHB_OTS_622_London_New_York_NY_Bloomsbury_T_and_T_Clark_2020