Rhetorical questions, relevance and scales

• Autores: Javier Gutiérrez Rexach
• Localización: Alicante Journal of English Studies / Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses: RAEI, ISSN-e 2171-861X, ISSN 0214-4808, Nº. 11, 1998 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Relevance theory / coord. por José Mateo Martínez, Francisco Yus Ramos), págs. 139-156
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 3 Citas
• Resumen

  • Rhetorical questions, and other varieties of pragmatically conditioned questions, present a challenge for a purely truth-conditional theory of the interpretation of interrogatives. In this paper, it is argued that relevance-theoretic principles account for the conditions of use of rhetorical questions. Concretely, it is proposed that a pragmatic principle, the "Bottom of Scale Principle", critically interacts with the Principle of Relevance and derives the dynamic meaning of the rhetorical use of a question. The Bottom of Scale Principle is also associated with the particular entailment and monotonicity properties of interrogatives, which explain the ability of rhetorical questions to license negative polarity items.