How does a rhetorical question become an adverbial
npi down-toner? This paper focusses on a specific type
of grammaticalization process: the grammaticalization of a rhetorical construction
à la
Goldberg (1995), namely, a “constructionalized rhetorical question” (
Bardenstein 2018) which turns into a down-toning adverbial. The particular focus of this
paper is on the Hebrew
lo mi yodea ma (‘not who knows what’; i.e., ‘not of high quality/quantity’) which has
developed from the constructionalization of two earlier constructions. Initially, the biblical question-phrase
mi
yodea (‘who knows’) constructionalized as “negatively biased” (
Ladusaw
1996). This is a rhetorical question, to which the obvious answer is negative, and in our case
mi
yodea can be interpreted as ‘nobody knows’. Most often, it is the case of “not knowing” what the future holds. Then,
once a direct object
ma (‘what’) was added, it constructionalized once again into a strengthening/
intensification construction
mi yodea ma (‘who knows what’), conveying high quantity/quality. This happened since
“not knowing what is to happen” can be interpreted as “anything can happen” and this interpretation was used rhetorically to
strengthen one‘s utterance. Lastly,
mi yodea ma (‘who knows what’) constructionalized under the scope of the
negation operator
lo (‘not’), into a versatile down-toning adverbial:
lo mi yodea ma. Since it
is very difficult to negate a strongly positive construction without implying that a less positive one is to some extent true,
this negated construction became a versatile down-toner.