Que fais, Adam?

In order to apply the principles of dialogue analysis to questions and their linguistic realisations in Old French I have chosen as a textual basis the “Jeu d’Adam”, because this play views the well-known story of the Fall of Man also as a dialogic play with the seductive power of questions. Thus, the “Jeu d’Adam” seems a good field of examination for a linguist who wants to ask some questions about the forms and functions of interrogatives. A study of questions implies on the one hand the specific formal type of interrogative sentences and on the other hand, the interrogative act as the illocution of asking a question. The crucial point in a linguistic analysis is here to model the relations between interrogative sentences and interrogative acts, separating both levels methodically, then bringing them together again in a synthesis when describing the illocutionary potential of certain interrogative sentence types. In the following analysis, I will limit myself to certain types of interrogative acts which occur with a high frequency and which in my opinion express basic communicative needs. In a next step, I will illustrate the verbal realisations of these illocutionary acts with examples taken from the “Jeu d’Adam”, putting my emphasis on interrogative sentence types. In the first paragraphs, I will expose some special characteristics of the adjacency pair of question and answer and try to formulate a definition of the illocutionary act of asking a question. Then I shall turn to a presentation of various types of interrogative acts described as typical illocutions, which I will try to illustrate with examples from the “Jeu d’Adam”, i. e., the method applied will be onomasiologic, focusing on the contextual function of the interrogative act. In a synoptic view, I will then summarise and link the results to the dialogue types used in the play and concentrate on their possible roots in historical circumstances.