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Rhetorical questions (RQs), as a cross-breed of questions and statements, represent an effective tool in putting forward the Speaker's ideas, as well as influencing the ideas and opinions of other people. Because of their communicative effectiveness and multifunctionality, they are frequently used in different contexts and for different purposes, and, as such, they represent an interesting topic for further research. The aim of this paper is threefold: (i) to explore the nature of the implied answer to RQs, (ii) to offer a classification of RQs based on the Speaker's communication style, and (iii) to examine whether (or to what extent) the Speaker-Addressee relationship (peer-to-peer, superior-to-inferior, inferior-to-superior) influences the selection and frequency of use of different types of RQs. Using Stalnaker’s (2002) model of Common Ground and Caponigro and Sprouse’s (2007) concepts of Speaker's and Addressee's Beliefs, the author redefines the nature of the answers implied by RQs, claiming that they are imposed on the Addressee rather than mutually recognized as obvious. Based on the model of communication styles as defined by Yuan et al. (2018), RQs are classified into aggressive, friendly and sarcastic/ironical questions with imposed answers. The analysis of the corpus, which consisted of 275 RQs taken from ten American movie scripts, showed that friendly RQs are more common than the other two types, and that, in instances where one of the interlocutors is in a superior position, superior-to-inferior RQs are by far more common than vice versa. The finding that RQs asked by inferiors make up less than a third of RQs occurring between interlocutors with different social standing is in line with the view that answers to RQs are imposed on Addressees.

This study uses modern linguistic theory to analyze a frequently recurring syntactic phenomenon in the Hebrew Bible that has thus far resisted explanation: כי אם. The combination of the two particles כי and אם produces a construction that is notoriously difficult to describe, analyze syntactically, and translate. Dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew offer a dizzying variety of translations for this construction, including “that if,” “except,” “unless,” “but,” “but only,” and “surely,” among other possibilities. In this book, Grace J. Park provides a new approach that strives for greater precision and consistency in translation. Park argues that כי אם is used in three patterns: the “full focus” pattern, the “reduced focus” pattern, and the less common “non-focus” pattern. Her syntactic analysis of all 156 occurrences of the כי אם construction in the Bible lends greater clarity to the contested passages. Drawing on recent linguistic research into the typology of clausal nominalization as well as previous work on contrastive focus, this innovative project provides important new insight into the syntax of Biblical Hebrew. It will be especially valuable for scholars seeking to translate כי אם more consistently and accurately.

One controversy in the study of the Chinese ‘what’-based rhetorical question -RQ for short) is how it takes on a negative interpretation. This paper attempts to apply enthymeme or rhetorical syllogism to the deduction of negative meaning of the -RQ. Triggered by the -RQ, or one of its words or phrases, the hearer extracts the explicit premise, fills in the premise that is implicit either in the context or in her or his encyclopedic knowledge, and deduces the conclusion, the negative meaning of the -RQ. According to what premises are left out, the paper also explores the deduction patterns of the negative meaning of -RQs and proposes a procedure for obtaining the negative interpretation. That said, the negative meaning of the -RQ will be entrenched in the mind of its users and conventionalized in the Mandarin Chinese community via repeated use.

This paper aims to explore whether some rhetorical questions contain certain linguistic elements or forms which would differentiate them from answer-eliciting and action-eliciting questions, and thereby hint at their rhetorical nature even outside the context. Namely, despite the fact that the same questions can be rhetorical in one context, and answer-eliciting in another, some of them are more likely to be associated with rhetorical or non-rhetorical use. The analysis is based on extensive data (over 1200 examples of rhetorical questions taken from 30 plays by two British and two American writers), and the results are expected to give an insight into whether we can talk about rhetorical questions or just a rhetorical use of questions.

Foreign branding—or using brand names that evoke foreign associations through, for example, spelling a brand name in a foreign language—is a popular means in both developed and emerging countries of suggesting a specific country of origin (COO) in the hope that it will evoke certain product qualities. As a result, consumers increasingly encounter products with brand names that imply a COO that differs from the actual COO (where the product is manufactured). In four experiments, the authors find support for the hypothesis that incongruence between the actual COO and implied COO decreases purchase likelihood asymmetrically. Incongruence backfires in hedonic categories but has hardly any effect in utilitarian categories. Furthermore, incongruence decreases purchase likelihood more if the actual COO is an emerging rather than developed country. The authors address the psychological process underlying the asymmetric effect of incongruence by showing that consumers apply different information-processing strategies to hedonic versus utilitarian products. These results have important implications for (foreign) branding decisions.

Recent research has shown that rhetorical questions (RQs) have certain prosodic characteristics in terms of voice quality, tempo, and intonation, which distinguish them from genuine, information-seeking questions (ISQs). This paper focuses on the interaction between prosodic cues to rhetorical meaning on the one hand, and lexical and morpho-syntactic means, on the other, in German. The production experiment reported on here addresses three research questions, in short: (i) do speakers prefer a specific syntactic construction for an RQ, (ii) do they make use of specific lexical and morpho-syntactic means to signal rhetorical meaning, and (iii) what is the interaction between those means and prosodic cues. The answers are: (i) yes (wh-questions), (ii) yes (especially discourse markers (DiPs)), and (iii) we find an additive effect enforcing the rhetorical message. When lexical (or morpho-syntactic) cues to rhetorical meaning are used, we do not observe a reduction in or lack of prosodic means at the same time. For example, when a DiP is present, an RQ will still have a typical nuclear accent and edge tone, i.e., cues are used in an additive, rather than an exclusive way. There are, however, RQs that are marked only in the prosody, without any lexical or morpho-syntactic cues present.

This paper investigates the deontic modal in Cantonese. I argue that is an NPI and a negative operator is induced at the sentence-initial position by the SFPs or in rhetorical questions. In SAI sentence, must syntactically agree with the negative operator for licensing, and minimality and locality effects are found in such agreement. This study may provide evidence of a syntactic approach to NPI licensing and rhetorical questions.

This article contributes to our knowledge about the prosodic realisation of rhetorical questions (RQs) as compared to information-seeking questions (ISQs). It reports on a production experiment testing the prosody of English wh- and polar RQs and ISQs in a Canadian variety. In previous literature, the contribution of prosody to the distinction between the two illocution types has often been limited to the intonational realisation of the terminus of the utterance, i.e. whether it ends in a rise or a fall. Along with edge tones, we tested other phonological and phonetic parameters. Our results are as follows: (i) The intonational terminus was distinctive only for polar questions (rise vs plateau), not for wh-questions (low throughout). (ii) Moreover, the semantic difference between RQs and ISQs is signalled by pitch accents. It is reflected in nuclear pitch accent type for wh-questions, and accent type and position for polar questions. (iii) Phonetically, RQs are produced with longer constituent durations and – for wh-questions – a softer voice quality in the wh-word. Taken together, several intonational categories and phonetic parameters contribute to the distinction between RQs and ISQs. A simple distinction between rising and falling intonation is in any case insufficient.

The goal of this study is to provide better empirical insight into the licensing conditions of a large set of NPIs in German so that they can be used as reliable diagnostics in future research on negation-related phenomena. Experiment 1 tests the acceptability of 60 NPIs under semantic operators that are expected to license superstrong, strong, weak, and nonveridicality-licensed NPIs, respectively: antimorphic ( not ), anti-additive ( no ), downward entailing ( hardly ), nonveridical ( maybe , question). Controls were positive assertions. Cluster analysis revealed seven clusters of NPIs, some of which confirm the licensing categorization from the literature (superstrong and weak NPIs). Other clusters show unclear patterns (overall high or medium ratings) and require further scrutiny in future research. One cluster showed high acceptability ratings only with the antimorphic and the question operator. Experiment 2 tested whether the source of this unexpected distribution was a rhetorical interpretation of the questions. Results suggest that rhetoricity was not the sole source. Overall, the results show gradual rather than categorical differences in acceptability, with higher acceptability corresponding to stronger negativity. The paper provides the detailed results for the individual NPIs as a preliminary normed acceptability index.

Widely attested cross-linguistically, the Negative WH (NWH)-construction involves the special use of w/i-words (e.g., 'where', 'what', and 'how') to convey negation in certain specific contexts. The first half of this paper identifies the negative assertion as the primary meaning of the NWH construction, in addition to two conventional implicatures. In the second half, I argue that the grammatical features in NWHCs in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese strongly suggest that NWHCs should be analyzed as interrogative w/i-questions. The quantification domain of NWH-words is the sets of propositions that pick out the conversational backgrounds of the sentence (Kratzer 1977; Portner 2009). The NWHC can be paraphrased as \"What is the proposition q such that in view of q, p is true?\" However, the interrogative question can only receive a negative rhetorical interpretation (i.e., a question without a true answer) because the conventional implicatures make it impossible for p to be true against any of the conversational backgrounds.