Interpreting Quranic Rhetorical Questions As Indirect Speech Acts: Part-III

Abstract

As a sequel to Gul and Ahmed (2024, 2024a), the current paper replicates the previously used method of qualitative analysis to explore illocutionary force of another set of rhetorical questions collected from the Holy Quran that can be interpreted as indirect speech acts. Since the entire data set comprised total thirty-three rhetorical questions that share exactly[1] same syntactic phrase in their beginning, it was divided into three subsets. While in Part-I, we analyzed only first 7 rhetorical questions, we decided to work on subsequent 12 questions in Part II,  and now we analyze the last 13 instances. Our current analysis is informed by the methodological considerations and the theoretical underpinning elaborated in Part-I (Gul and Ahmed, 2024). We propose that the rhetorical questions interpreted as indirect speech acts reveal several differences and similarities in their illocutionary force. The findings show that the rhetorical questions perform a wide range of illocutionary acts, but they vary in their performativity when the content of the message, its social context and the addressee of the message change. Moreover, it was also found that there were striking similarities in their application of engaging strategies to impact readers emotionally, thus, amplify not only their persuasive power but also psychological appeal. Apart from a large number of similarities, we have also marked minor differences in their pragmatic metafunctions.