Rhetorical questions

Stylistic use of structural meaning.

Unuttered or Inner Represented Speech

Language has two functions: the com­municative and the expressive. The communicative function serves to convey one's thoughts, volitions, emotions and orders to the mind of a second person. The expressive function serves to shape one's thoughts and emotions into language forms. This second function is the only way of materializing thoughts and emotions. Without language forms thought is not yet thought but only something being shaped as thought.

The thoughts and feelings going on in one's mind and reflecting same previous experience are called inner speech.

Inasmuch as inner speech has no communicative function, it is very fragmentary, incoherent, isolated, and consists of separate units which only hint at the content of the utterance but do not word it explicitly.

Inner speech is a psychological phenomenon. But when it is wrought into full utterance, it ceases to be inner speech, acquires a communicative function and becomes a phenomenon of language. The expressive function of language is suppressed by its communicative function, and the reader is presented with a complete language unit capable of carrying informa­tion. This device is called inner represented speech.

Inner represented speech ex­presses feelings and thoughts of the character which were not materialized in a language by the character. This device completely depicts the character. It shows the inner springs which guide his character’s actions and utterances and by the author himself makes the impact on the reader.

Every syn­tactical structure has its definite function, which is sometimes called its structural meaning. When a structure is used in some other function it assumes a new meaning which is similar to lexical transferred meaning.

Among syntactical stylistic devices there are two in which this trans­ference of structural meaning is to be seen. They are rhetorical questions and litotes.

The rhetorical question (2) is a special syntactical stylistic device the essence of which consists in reshaping the grammatical mean­ing of the interrogative sentence. There is an interplay of two structural meanings: 1) that of the question and 2) that of the statement (either affirmative or negative). Both are materialized simultaneously. For example:

"Are these the remedies for a starving and desperate populace?" "Is there not blood enough upon your penal code, that more must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven and testify against you?"

Rhetorical ques­tions are generally structurally embodied in complex sentences with the subordinate clause containing the pronouncement. Here is another example:

"...Shall the sons of Chimary

Who never forgive the fault of a friend

Bid an enemy live?" (Byron)

Without the attributive clause the rhetorical question would lose its specific quality and might be regarded as an ordinary question. The subordinate clause signalizes the rhetorical question. Negative-interrogative sentences have a peculiar nature. There is always an additional shade of meaning implied in them: some­times doubt, sometimes assertion, sometimes suggestion. They are full of emotive meaning and modality.

We have already stated that rhetorical questions may be looked upon as a transference of grammatical meaning. Both the question-meaning and the statement-meaning are materialized with an emotional charge that can be judged by the intonation of the speaker.

The intonation of rhetorical questions differs from the intonation of ordinary ques­tions. This is an additional indirect proof of the double nature of this stylistic device.

Rhetorical questions may be defined as utterances in the form of questions which pronounce judgements and express various kinds of modal shades of meaning, as doubt, challenge, scorn, irony and so on.

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