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They are called, sometimes, sham questions




Stylistic devices based on the transposition of the meaning of the syntactical construction or the model of the sentence

According to type of communication sentences are divided into declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory. Besides, all sentences are either affirmative or negative. Each of these classes has its formal and intonational distinctive features. But the sentence, which is formally declarative, interrogative, affirmative or negative, may be used, for the sake of emphasis, to perform a different communicative function. Syntactical forms and meanings are interwoven and easily interchangeable. Thus an affirmative declarative sentence may be used as a question if the speaker anticipates the positive answer and means to emphasize that he/she is not impartial to that answer.

Contextual transposition of the meaning of a sentence:

1. Exclamatory sentences with inversion

Much he knew about it! = He did not know much about it.

2. Negative sentences implying emphatic affirmation

Don’t I remember!

Have I not reason to lament!

What man has made of man! (Wordsworth)

3. Interrogative-affirmative sentences

Me a liar? = I am not a liar

B.A.IIyish calls such sentences "semi-interrogative" and cites the following example: "Oh, you've seen him? " She did not particularly mark her question for an answer, but it was, after all, the pivot-point, and Bone found him­self replying - that indeed he had." It is this usage of syntactical patterns in non-characteristic communicative functions and with emphatic connota­tions that is called their transposition. Let us consider some more cases of colloquial transposition.

The emphatic exclamatory affirmation may be expressed in the form of a general question. E.g. Do you realize it's nearly midnight? — Don't we know it!

The emphatic "sham questions" may be still more intensified by adding the so-called appended question (... or is,... or has,... or can + a personal pronoun echoing the subject).

E.g. Has that dame gotta swell voice or has she?

The emphatic nature of the sentences is pointed rather by the initial question form ("Has that dame...") than by the end which introduces a wry, ironic and unmeant doubt.

Yu. Screbnev calls the sentences with reevaluated syntactical meaning as:

- quasi-negative (Did I say a word about the money? = I did not say …)

- quasi-affirmative (Isn’t it too bad? = That is too bad)

- quasi-imperative, which express inducement without the imperative form of the verb (Tea. For two. Out here.)

I.V.Arnold notes that the interrogative patterns used as mild imperatives are al­so in essence a kind of transposition because the imperative mood even if accompani­ed with please jars the English ear and an expressive polite request should be shaped into an interrogative construction: Open the door, please turns into Will you open the door, please or Would you mind opening the door or I wonder whether you would mind opening the door.

A huge group of transformed sentences is presented by rhetoric questions.

Rhetorical questions are negative or affirmative statements which are used in the form of a question. The possible answer to these questions is implied within its boundaries.

E.g. After all did it matter so much? Yes, did it matter? What were a few million human animals more or less? Why agonize about it? … Is there nothing but despair and death? Is life vain, beauty vain, love vain, hope vain, happiness vain? “The war to end war!” – is anyone so asinine as to believe that? (R. Aldington)




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