|
|
WE KNOW, THEREFORE I ASK
Ivano Caponigro University of California San Diego Friday, April 20, 3:30pm, MJH Rm 126 Rhetorical questions constitute an extremely interesting area of investigation for the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface, given the mixed properties they exhibit: they look like standard questions, but are not used like standard questions, nor - it has been claimed - are interpreted as standard questions. For instance, it has been suggested that a rhetorical question like the one in (2) "feels" closer in meaning to the negative statement in (3) rather than to the ordinary question in (1), though (1) and (2) look identical. (1) (I am really curious:) what does Onavi know about semantics? Standard Question (2) (After all,) what does Onavi know about semantics? Rhetorical Question (3) (After all,) Onavi knows nothing about semantics. Negative Statement In this talk, I first present evidence that shows that rhetorical questions are semantically the same as ordinary questions (they allow for an answer and the answer does not need to be a negative one). Then, I argue that the differences between rhetorical and ordinary questions can be accounted for by looking at their pragmatics, in particular at the different relations the speaker and the addressee hold with regard to the true answer to the question. Intuitively, the answer to an ordinary question is not known to the speaker, while the answer to a rhetorical question is known to both the speaker and the addressee. I outline a preliminary implementation of this idea by using Stalnaker's (1978) notion of Common Ground (CG). Finally, I briefly discuss some predictions that this pragmatic analysis makes for the typology of questions. 
|