Questions in Shijing : A Study of Indirect Speech Acts from a Motivation Perspective

This study explores the speech act of questioning in Shijing 诗经, a collection of poems compiled in the third century BCE, China. We will argue that, as a cover term for the illocution of seeking information, questioning is used to perform a host of other speech acts. The reason for doing so, we contend, is to achieve both clarity and effectiveness (separately) in the expression of the myriad emotions in the poems. Further, we demonstrate that these intended acts are closely related to the genre of poetry as well as to the subgenres of Shijing , thus contributing to stylistics, genre analysis, and pragmatics.