70
Old English Hwæt
1969 : 1547– 1548). This suggestion seems to be based in part upon the use
of hwæt to translate Latin sentences with nonne or numquid. Visser gives
only four OE examples with declarative word order and one with interroga-
tive order, while BTS gives two examples, both with interrogative order.^38
Mitchell ( 1985 , I: 680) disputes the interpretation of Visser ’s examples, sug-
gesting instead that this use of hwæt is “exclamatory”; in fact, both the OED
and Visser note the confusion between the general interrogative use and the
exclamatory use, especially when hwæt precedes a clause with interroga-
tive word order. Thus, the existence of this particle of interrogation remains
controversial.
The general interrogative sense of hwæt provides the semantic source, via
conversational implicatures in certain contexts, for the ‘shared knowledge’
sense, the ‘contextual implication of preceding event’ sense, and the ‘surprise’
sense of the word. The fi rst two of these functions make their appearance in
Old English, though the textual (‘so’) function of hwæt þa may be slightly later
than the interpersonal (‘you know’) function of hwæt , given its restriction to
prose. The third function appears in Middle English (suggestions of an appear-
ance in Old English being discredited, see above).
The ‘shared knowledge’ – or ‘you know’ – pragmatic meaning arises out of
use of the interrogative in the context of fi rst- and second- person pronouns.
It results from a pragmatic inference : From a questioning of what the hearer
knows is inferred an expression of the speaker’s belief in, or confi rmation of,
what the hearer knows or of what is known by both speaker and hearer. This
represents an increase in the expression of speaker attitude or subjectivity
(Traugott 1995b ). Such a progression accords well with children’s acquisi-
tion of you know : They use the collocation you know fi rst with the meaning
‘you have knowledge,’ then ‘I know that you know,’ and fi nally ‘it’s obvious’
(Östman 1981 : 50).
The ‘contextual implicature of preceding event’ – or ‘so’ – pragmatic mean-
ing of hwæt þa would seem to derive quite naturally from the interrogative
sense of hwæt combined with the temporally successive meaning of þa ‘then’
as well as with its discourse- structuring function (see Wårvik 2013 ). In the
context of a narrative, interrogative hwæt þa ‘what then?’ expects an answer
expressing the subsequent event, ‘this is what then happened.’ The content-
induced inference – that the following action is implied by the preceding
action – becomes the conventional meaning of the formula hwæt þa , which
thus changes from interrogative to declarative in force. The meaning of ‘caus-
ality’ expressed by hwæt þa may be seen as developing from the meaning of
38 The one interrogative example in the OED is taken from BTS. One of Visser ’s examples is my
example (4c).