143
(208) a.
What has John done for anybody? (Rhetorical question)
b.
John hasn’t done anything for anybody. (Statement)
c.
#What has John done for anybody? (Question)
Athough queclaratives may license NPIs, they are otherwise not formally marked in English.
Queclaratives are not, however, the only
type of rhetorical questions, at least if the main
criteria used to define them is that of not expecting a reply. Even in English, it is possible to find
examples of questions that do not expect a response, yet which do
not meet the criteria for
queclaratives:
(209)
Am I cute, or what? (≈
I am cute.)
(210)
Why does God hate me?
The above two examples are clearly rhetorical questions, in as much as neither question
anticipates a reply, yet they are clearly not queclaratives. Example (27) is semantically
equivalent to a statement of the same polarity, and (28) expects no answer, as it is a
philosophical musing.
More recent approaches to the expression of emotivity have found
that the combination
of emotivity and interrogativity produce a wide range of results. For Japanese, Maynard (2002)
lists four types of emotive questions:
i.)
Self-inquiry interrogatives, in which the speaker addresses a question to him or herself
ii.)
Self-acceptance interrogatives, in which the speaker is involved with the processing of
new information, particularly surprising or unexpected information
iii.)
Metacommunicative interrogatives, in which the speaker’s non-expectation
of an answer
is employed to modify the speech act, particularly in a way that expresses doubt
iv.)
Rhetorical questions, in which the speaker employs an utterance with interrogative form
to express a non-interrogative proposition of the opposite polarity.
144
In the interest of maintaining consistent terminology, Maynard’s
rhetorical questions will be
referred to as
queclaratives. As none of the question types described
above anticipate any
response, the entire class of emotive questions described above will be called
rhetorical
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