Expressive Questions in Jan Śniadecki’s Journalism

Abstract

The paper characterises expressive questions (belonging to the group of the so-called surface questions) in Jan Śniadecki’s journalism. Śniadecki was one of the leading representatives of intellectual life, the education and socio-cultural turn of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The syntactic units are considered as linguistic interpretations of persuasive discourse. The classification of expressive questions has been conducted on the basis of the methodology of pragmatic questions. In the material under analysis there are three principal types of interrogative sentences: postulative, declarative, and deliberative expressions. Each of the types fulfils different functions, and the differences as to the frequency of questions in the texts are a telling sing of the kind the transmitting-receiving relation in the persuasive strategy. The overall description of the structures under analysis supplement syntactic-stylistic questions (expressive questions versus accumulations and repetitions) and textological (expressive questions and composition of the text).