There is a structural type of rhetorical questions, which is based on negation

Unlike an ordinary question the rhetorical question does not demand any information but serves to express the emotions of the speaker and also to call the attention of listeners.

Rhetorical questions make an indispensable part of oratorical style for they very successfully emphasize the speaker’s ideas. In fact the speaker knows the answer himself and gives it immediately after the question is asked. The interrogative intonation and/or punctuation draw the attention of listeners (readers) to the focus of the utterance.

Rhetorical questions are also often asked in "unanswerable" cases, as when in distress or anger we resort to phrases like "What have I done to deserve..." or "What shall I do when...".

They are widely used in modern fiction for depicting the inner state of mind of a character, his/her meditations and thoughts.

E.g. What’s the use to be alive when everything is rotten and nobody knows what to do? What’s the use to go to school and learn arithmetic and read poems and paint eggplants and all that stuff? What’s the use to sit in a cold room until it is time to go to bed and hear Jake and his wife fighting all the time and to sleep and cry and wake up and see the sad sky and feel the cold air and shiver and walk to school and eat oranges for lunch instead of bread? (W. Saroyan)

The rhetorical question is a special syntactical stylistic device the essence of which consists in reshaping the grammatical meaning of the interrogative sentence. In other words, the question is no longer a question but a statement expressed in the form of an interrogative sentence. Thus 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.

One can agree with Prof. Popov who states: "...the rhetorical question is equal to a categorical pronouncement plus an exclamation." Indeed, if we compare an utterance expressed as a statement with the same utterance expressed as a rhetorical question by means of transfor­mational analysis, we will see that the interrogative form makes the utterance still more categorical.

Don’t I remember!

Have I not reason to lament!

What man has made of man! (Wordsworth)

Negative-interrogative sentences generally have a peculiar nature. There is always an additional shade of meaning implied in them: sometimes assertion, sometimes suggestion. In other words, they are full of emotive meaning and modality.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11