A Study Of Rhetorical Question In Thunderstorm

Thunderstorm is one of Cao Yu’s representative works, and it takes a very important role in the drama history of China. According to statistics, Thunderstorm is just more than70,000words, but has313rhetorical questions.We can see rhetorical questions have a great proportion. People have concentrated in the Thunderstorm’s language arts or character analysis, and the works has very little research from the linguistic point of view. In this paper, from the point of view of the language itself, using the knowledge of syntax, semantics and pragmatics as a starting point, combined with knowledge of the semantics and pragmatics we conduct a comprehensive analysis to Thunderstorm’s rhetorical questions.From a syntactic point of view, Thunderstorm’s rhetorical questions are divided into four types, specially-referred rhetorical question, yes or no rhetorical question, positive and negative question and selective rhetorical question.After different analysis, we divide yes or no rhetorical question into“难道”类、“不/没有”类、“不是”类、“还”类、“以为”类、“反而”类�'�无标记类Specially-referred rhetorical question divide into“谁”类、“怎么”类、“哪”类、“什么”类、“为什么”类、“何必”类The selective rhetorical question and positive-negative rhetorical question is used very little in Thunderstorm. Selective rhetorical question is divided into three types: full negative, the former negative and the latter negative. Positive-negative rhetorical question is divided into the former negation and the latter negation.From a semantic point of view, we found that the sentence structure, context and tone play a restrictive role in the semantics of the rhetorical question.Through the analysis of the rhetorical question of Thunderstorm, we find it has five derivative functions. They are the function of expressing discontent, the function of rebuttal, the function of remind, the function of Confused and the function of Suggestion and persuasion.In addition to syntax, semantic and pragmatic analysis of the Thunderstorm’s rhetorical question, in each chapter summary, we have some recommendations on the teaching of Chinese as a Foreign Language, so it will be able to help the Chinese rhetorical question’s teaching.