A Study On Modern Chinese Rhetorical Questions

Rhetorical question is a kind of particular syntax and a commonly used rhetorical device in daily communication.Scholars have published a large number of papers and thesis.The community has made many achievements.However,questions like the essence,symbols and context of rhetorical question in modern Chinese need to be solved.Therefore,this thesis mainly focuses on modern Chinese rhetorical questions.On the basis of previous research,we make efforts to do further research of the essence,symbols and context of modern Chinese rhetorical questions.This thesis is formed by the following four parts:In the first chapter,we mainly introduce the reason for this thesis’ s topic selection,the significant of the theme,related research achievements,research methods and corpus thesis of the thesis.In the second chapter,we probe into the essence of modern Chinese rhetorical question,make our own definition of rhetorical question.We support that a rhetorical questioner asks questions in the context with no doubt,in order to force the listener to come up with an answer completely against the background of the question,and to deny or ridicule.We discuss the fundamental features,for example,the rhetorical question is to deny,there is no doubt in rhetorical question,and it has the enhanced language potential.All these features are based on the context.We also discussed about the features of modern Chinese rhetorical question,such as its intonation,accent and punctuation marks.In the third chapter,we researched the basic form of rhetorical question.In the forth chapter,we choose typical symbols of rhetorical question such as “nandao”“mofei” “nali” “haibu” “bushi” “zenme” and so on.We explore their process of grammaticalization,and analyze their usage of rhetorical question.