Meaning and use of rhetorical questions
Abstract
This paper attributes the use of rhetorical questions as emphatic statements to their literal meaning as a question. The proposed account of rhetorical questions focusses on negative polarity items (NPIs), a characteristic of these questions. The integration of an NPI into a question greatly affects the set of exhaustive answers to this question (i.e., the meaning of the question). For yes/no-questions this introduces the presupposition that the corresponding question without the NPI is already settled in the negative, which is seen as the main impact of the NPI and the reason for the rhetoricity of the question (Krifka 1995; van Rooy 2003). It will first be shown that for wh-questions, however, the integration of an NPI does not settle the corresponding question without NPI in the same way. It is argued that rhetoricity already emerges from the general threshold-lowering effect of NPIs, which makes in particular wh-questions too general to be of interest to the speaker (in a literal interpretation). Second, I will then explain why rhetorical questions do not violate felicity conditions even though they are not interpreted as ordinary information-seeking questions: They are used in indirect speech acts, which explains why they do not seek information, and in such speech acts, questions are evaluated against the common ground. Rhetorical questions thus emerge a means of presenting a statement not as the speaker's personal opinion, but as a consequence of the common ground, which explains their persuasive effect.
