Speaker: Michela Ippolito (University of Toronto)
Title: What makes rhetorical questions rhetorical
Time: Friday 02/28 at 3:30-5pm
Location: 32-141
Abstract:
The question of what is special about rhetorical questions has been subject to debate for quite some time. One prominent view is that what makes rhetorical questions rhetorical is that they, unlike canonical questions, bear a special relation with the common ground: some theories propose that a rhetorical question is a question whose answer is in the common ground (e.g. Caponigro and Sprouse 2007); some theories propose that a rhetorical question presupposes that its answer is in the common ground (e.g. Biezma and Rawlins 2017); other theories propose a more intricare relation with the common ground (Farkas (2024)). In this talk I discuss some types of rhetorical questions which I argue challenge common ground theories of rhetorical questions and discuss how one might go about developing a different theory of rhetoricity.