Asking Questions And Making Statements: A Cognitive Pragmatic Study Of Rhetorical Questions

The present paper, drawing upon the theory of speech act metonymy put forward by Panther & Thornburg (1997; 1998; 1999), focuses on the study of the relationship between the act of asking questions and that of making statements in rhetorical questions. It belongs to a qualitative study based on the data extracted from novels, plays, advertisements, and our daily conversations. This study is aimed to unearth the mechanism lying behind the use of rhetorical questions and to unveil the nature of pragmatic inference with regard to the meanings of rhetorical questions.Through close observation of the data, we notice that being interrogative in form, rhetorical questions convey statements, to be precise, challenging statements. In other words, rhetorical questions are employed to challenge the prior utterance or action of the hearer in the purpose of inducing his acceptance or action compliance. The form-function asymmetry in rhetorical questions indicates that they perform indirect speech acts in which the act of making statements is actualized by the act of asking questions. Speaking and understanding indirect speech acts involves a kind of metonymic reasoning (Gibbs, 1994: 352; Thornburg & Panther, 1997: 206). Cognitive linguistics assumes that metonymy is not merely a referential device, but a way of our thinking. In accordance with Lakoff (1987: 77), metonymy is a way of cognition whereby we take one well-understood or easily perceived aspect to represent or stand for the thing as a whole.The concept of metonymy can operate either at the propositional level or beyond the propositional level. Accordingly, metonymic relationships can be divided into two basic types: propositional metonymies and speech act metonymies (illocutionary metonymies) (Panther & Thornburg, 1998: 758; 1999: 335). In the case of speech act metonymy, one illocutionary act stands for, i.e. has the same illocutionary force as, another illocutionary act (Panther & Thornburg, 1998: 757). As to speech act metonymy, we hold that in rhetorical questions, the act of asking questions has the same illocutionary force as, or stands for, the act of making statements.Speech acts and their felicity conditions are best described as scenarios, to be more specific, as action scenarios. Scenarios consist of parts which can bear metonymic relations to each other and to the whole of the scenario. An action scenario comprises at least the following parts: the BEFORE component, used to state the conditions that must be fulfilled before the action proper can take place; the CORE component, used to describe the essential features of the action itself and its immediate RESULT that obtains if the action is felicitously performed; and the AFTER component, used to relate the intended or unintended consequences of the action (Panther & Thornburg, 1998: 758-759).By virtue of the Action Scenario and State-of-Affairs Scenario constructed by Panther & Thornburg (1997; 1998; 1999), this author ventures to establish tentatively the scenario of making statements by rhetorical questions(the RQ Scenario)as follows:(i) The BEFORE: S disagrees with H, regarding H's prior utterance or action as unreasonable, inappropriate, unnecessary, or not right. S wants H to accept her opinion or do the required action.(ii) The CORE: S challenges H to agree with her or do the required action. The RESULT: H is challenged to agree with S or do something as is required.(iii) The AFTER: H will agree with S or do the required action, or otherwise. (S and H designate the speaker and the hearer respectively.)The BEFORE component of the RQ Scenario is that the hearer has uttered or done something which the speaker deems inappropriate, unnecessary, not right, or something equivalent. The BEFORE is the precondition for the successful performance of the speech act. The CORE is that the speaker challenges the hearer to approve of her opinion or do the required action and accordingly its RESULT component is that the hearer is challenged to agree with the speaker or do something as required. It is worthy of pointing out that her opinion is, commonly speaking, opposite to his opinion which is indicated by his prior utterance or action. The AFTER component refers to the future action of the hearer: he can either accept the challenge or otherwise. By highlighting or foregrounding one of the components: the BEFORE, the CORE/RESULT, or the AFTER of the RQ Scenario, the speaker is thus able to make statements by asking rhetorical questions. More specifically, the speaker can make statements by way of rhetorical questions through giving prominence to the BEFORE, viz. the speaker's disagreement with the prior utterance or action of the hearer, or to the CORE/RESULT, viz. the challenge of the speaker that the hearer should endorse her view or do the required action, or to the AFTER, viz. the future action of the hearer after being challenged by the speaker.Having discovered the mechanism, viz. metonymy in the use of rhetorical questions, we still feel curious about the interpretation of the metonymic function in rhetorical questions on the part of the hearer. The interpretative process includes the identification of rhetorical questions from genuine ones and the inference of the meanings of rhetorical questions. To identify a rhetorical question from genuine questions, we need to resort to the sequential position in which a question occurs. Rhetorical questions occur frequently in environments of disagreement. After the speaker is attacked, say, accused, blamed and the like by the hearer, her subsequent question is most likely to be interpreted as a rhetorical question functioning as a counterattack. Speech act theorists assume that the intended communicative intention of indirect speech acts, including that of rhetorical questions, requires a certain amount of inference on the part of the hearer. We consider the pragmatic inference concerning rhetorical questions to be important and at the same time maintain that the pragmatic inference is facilitated by preexisting metonymic relations. For in line with the RQ Scenario, with the mutually shared knowledge between the speaker and the hearer, or the encyclopedic knowledge or the co-text, the hearer can infer that the speaker is making statements by rhetorical questions from one of the components—the BEFORE, the CORE/RESULT, or the AFTER—of the scenario. In conclusion, the current study has found that in rhetorical questions, the act of asking questions and that of making statements are of metonymic relationship. It is tantamount to claiming that metonymy functions in the use of rhetorical questions. In addition, we find that the inference of the meanings of rhetorical questions is metonymic in nature.Rhetorical questions are a language phenomenon so permeated in our daily conversations that a cognitive pragmatic study of it may prove its theoretical and pragmatic values.