Rhetorical Question

4 Key excerpts on "Rhetorical Question"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Routledge Handbook of Language and Persuasion

  • Jeanne Fahnestock, Randy Allen Harris, Jeanne Fahnestock, Randy Allen Harris(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Ilie (1994: 128) offers a synthetic explanation of their nature and functioning:

  A Rhetorical Question is a question used as a challenging statement to convey the addresser’s commitment to its implicit answer in order to induce the addressee’s mental recognition of its obviousness and the acceptance, verbalised or non-verbalised, of its validity.

  An illustration is provided in the dialogue below, where A uses an ironically meant Rhetorical Question to make a statement in response to M’s self-ironical question.

  1. M: Am I allowed to tell you that you are very beautiful? A:

     Isn’t this the country of free speech?

     (Excerpt from the British TV series The House of Eliott, 1991–1994)

  The challenging force of A’s Rhetorical Question that serves as a rejoinder is intensified by the ironical undertone (intended to match M’s self-ironical tone), and manages to skilfully convey an ambivalent attitude through reluctantly implying an affirmative answer.

  An important aspect of the versatile persuasiveness of the Rhetorical Question consists in having different interpretations depending on who is addressing the question to whom, and in what context. This can be masterfully illustrated with Forsyth’s (2013) example: “Which party cares about what’s best for Britain?” Pragmatically, this question might be asked by a Labour leader in the context of a rally of Labour supporters and get the answer “Labour!” Or it might be asked by the Conservative leader at a rally of Conservative supporters and get the answer “Conservative!” Rhetorically, the same question could be interpreted as anacoenosis (a rhetorical figure in which an appeal to shared interests is made to one’s supporters or opponents regarding the subject under discussion). Alternatively, the question might be asked by a news commentator seeking to weigh up the pros and cons by means of anthypophora

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  eBook - ePub

  Critical Thinking

  A Concise Guide

  • Tracy Bowell, Robert Cowan, Gary Kemp(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Rhetorical Questions take the form of a question but indirectly assert a proposition (whereas a declarative sentence directly asserts a proposition). That is, they are not really used to ask a question, but to make a point in an indirect way. Speakers and writers often use Rhetorical Questions when they’re making a point they assume to be obvious, so the answer to the question ‘goes without saying’. However, in many cases the point is neither obvious nor universally agreed. Rhetorical Questions obfuscate speakers’ and writers’ intended meanings because they make it more difficult to interpret whether or not a speaker/writer really does support a given claim. Rhetorical Questions are common in polemical media articles and on Twitter. If you encounter Rhetorical Questions in texts and speech that you are analysing, try to rewrite the question as a declarative sentence. For instance, if someone were to write:

  What boy didn’t do this in high school?

  they probably wish to convey the proposition that ‘this’ is something that almost every boy did in high school (and so we should excuse it). They expect that the reader’s response will be an automatic ‘Can’t think of one’. To convey the proposition that seems to be intended, we could rewrite the Rhetorical Question as a declarative sentence:

  Almost every boy did this in high school (and so we should excuse it).

  You should resist the temptation to employ Rhetorical Questions in your own arguments and instead directly assert your conclusion and reasons for it using declarative sentences because that’s a clearer way of expressing arguments and leaves others in less doubt about what you want to say.

  Note that the argument implied by the Rhetorical Question above is an example of the fallacy of majority belief. See pp. 241–3 for a full account of this fallacy.

  Irony

  Speakers and writers sometimes express their claims using irony. This takes the form of language that, taken literally, would convey the opposite of what they wish to convey, or something otherwise very different from it. Consider the following instance:

  A young female singer performing at a televised entertainment awards ceremony twerks provocatively in front of male performers and the audience. Your mum says, ‘Oh, very tasteful!’

  Your mum is probably being ironic, and intends to express her opinion that the dancing is rather distasteful.

  It is important to be aware of the possibility of irony. In order to ridicule a position they are opposed to, speakers and writers, such as the performers on Saturday Night Live or the contestants on Have I Got News For You?, sometimes sarcastically pretend to espouse that position; but it isn’t always obvious that they are doing so. Another increasingly common use of irony is that of using irony as a way of glossing over having said something offensive. First the offensive claim or remark is made, then when it becomes clear that offence has been taken, the speaker claims they were just

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  Questions and Rhetoric in the Greek New Testament

  • Douglas Estes(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Zondervan Academic

    (Publisher)

  Example (2) is a highly biased question (“even” and “any” being key bias words; §4.U), formed as a negative polar question (§4.T). In this case, the semantic bias inserted into the question pushes the hearer to answer the thinly veiled challenge to their driving ability. More so, the hearer of such a question may begin to harbor fears about their driving ability as a result of the strong rhetoric of the question. The question still has an informational quality, though, as the receiver of the question will most likely have to answer in some way so as to defend (what they perceive of) their driving ability.

  On the level of pragmatics, the strongest rhetorical effects are in play, to the point that questions may come across almost as assertions:

  (3) Hello? Can you take my order now?

  (PRAGMATIC )

  In the case of the double question (§5.D.1) in (3), the asker uses a pragmatic strategy to strongly push the hearer (into taking the asker’s order). The use of the first question, “Hello?” is a phatic question (§4.K) meant to “wake up” the hearer — and soften them up for the second part of the double-question combination (most likely a confirmation question [§4.R] or a request question [§4.S]). The question string still has informational qualities, as the asker seeks to know from the hearer if the hearer is awake and able to take the asker’s order. The rhetorical expectation placed on the hearer is that they will comply with the asker’s aggressive push (or, perhaps, respond negatively). To summarize the general rules from §2.C.4, when it comes to rhetorical quality, semantics can trump syntax, and pragmatics can trump both.

  The category of Rhetorical Question is so broad as to be practically meaningless when it comes to understanding the purpose of a question.

  To bring the conversation back full circle, the concept of the “Rhetorical Question” is a modern idea that is so broad as to lack any explanatory power. The idea that “Rhetorical Questions” are simply assertions does not bear out when one considers questions on their own terms in light of their erotetic logic. And yet, the rhetorical force of interrogatives is similar to assertive force in many ways. They are not the same, but they both do rely on a type of rhetorical strategy common to human communication. This rhetorical strategy is what makes questions seem assertive and causes assertions to prompt questions.

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  The Intonation of English Statements and Questions

  A Compositional Interpretation

  • Christine Bartels(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Below are a few representative examples illustrating the range of utterances with both L- and H- variants that are generally subsumed under the label ‘rhetorical’. The proposition in parenthesis is the one the speaker intends to assert. Note that contrary to common assumption (cf. e.g. Quirk et al. 1985) it is not the case that rhetorical utterances (i.e., what are traditionally called ‘Rhetorical Questions’) are always rising in intonation.

  (5)  Isn’t Mady’s word good enough? (= Mady’s word is good enough.) a.    H*/L* H-H% b.    H*/L*+H L-L% (6)  I don’t see why I should pay for Greg’s excesses. Am I my brother’s keeper? (= I am not my brother’s keeper.)  a.      H*/L* H-H% #b.      H* L-L% (7)  What difference does it make? (= It makes no diff.) a.  H*/L*   H-H%/L% b.  H*/L*+H   L-L% (8)  Who worked her fingers to the bone for you? a.     H*/L* H-H%/L% b.     H*/L*+H L-L%     (= I worked … for you.)

  So what is it that identifies rhetorical utterances as ‘rhetorical’? There are at least three traditional ways in which ‘rhetorical’, in the context of ‘Rhetorical Questions’, has been defined. On one definition, any interrogative utterance that has an obvious answer from the speaker’s point of view qualifies. On a narrower variant of this, only interrogative utterances the obvious answer to which is not given by the surface proposition or (in the case of WHQs) the sentential presupposition are rhetorical. Finally, on a more interactive view, only interrogative utterances that do not expect the addressee to provide the answer (usually, but not necessarily, because it is obvious) are rhetorical.

  I am going to adopt the narrow view here, according to which the ‘answer’, or rather, the proposition the speaker wishes to assert through a rhetorical interrogative, cannot be inferred from the surface interrogative or its sentential presupposition; this allows me to treat ‘rhetorical’ interrogative non-questions as a subclass distinct from inferential interrogative non-questions as discussed in Section 8.1 above. However, as will become clear soon, phrasal intonational characteristics do not hinge on an utterance being rhetorical in this sense, i.e., on the relative opacity of the connection between surface proposition and asserted proposition; rather, they hinge—as they always have done up to now—on the grammaticized attitude ‘assertiveness’ per se, which in turn affects questionhood as defined here.

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