Acceso usuarios
Palma de Mallorca, España
This paper aims to investigate the specific mechanisms that contribute to formalizing the rhetorical interpretation of interrogative sentences throughout the history of Spanish. To this end, data from a corpus of biblical translations from the 13th to the 20th centuries are analyzed. As Biblical Hebrew and Latin use explicit elements to signal direct polar questions, it is relatively easy to locate a large number of passages with interrogative sentences, and then, examine the distribution of the translation equivalents used in the Spanish versions. The interrogative particles of Hebrew and Latin thus articulate a grammaticalized procedural meaning for which Spanish does not have an equivalent explicit marker. The systematic examination of the strategies that Spanish translators use to adapt these structures to their vernacular is therefore a way of accessing the intuitions of speakers from different periods in the history of Spanish in regard to the formulation of the rhetorical interrogative.
