A Pragmatic Account Of Rhetorical Questions As Responses

Rhetorical question (RQ) is frequently used in spoken English. The literature on rhetorical questions (RQs) is quite extensive, however, one type has received virtually less attention: the RQ used in response to a preceding question and whose answer is to be recognized as precisely the same as the first question's (called here the RQ-as-response). Therefore, based on the analyses of indirect corpus, this investigation attempts to present a pragmatic account of RQ-as-response.After an overview of the form and content features and the functions of the RQ-as-response, this thesis employs two pragmatic theories, Relevance Theory and Politeness Principle, to explain the special linguistic phenomenon. We come to the conclusion that RQs are well relevant to their previous questions and some RQs-as-response perform positive FTAs. Some RQs-as-response create humorous effect. On the one hand, addressees can infer the implicature of speakers by combining the mutual contextual beliefs, linguistic presumption and communicative presumption. On the other hand, politeness, as external factors, also governs the employment of RQ-as-response. When people perform speech acts, the speaker's face or both parties'face will be probably threatened. The employment of RQ-as-response by less intimate interlocutors threatens the hearer's positive face. Therefore, we should attach great attention to the usage of RQ-as-response.