영어 수사의문문에서의 형식，의미，언어적 추론

Abstract

As a kind of non-standard questions, rhetorical questions are the communicative devices for representing the speaker's assertion reversed to the opposite polarity. In view of the linguistic inferences for producing the speech act of denial and assertion,' this study offers a semantic and pragmatic approach to the mapping between the form and meaning of rhetorical questions in English. The analysis data are considered in two representative sentence forms of rhetorical questions: one of which includes the occurrence of conditionals, and the other of which includes the occurrence of wh-interrogatives. On the basis of explaining the mechanism of the linguistic inferences concerning the properties of (i) counter-factuality and (ii) quantificational force of existential/universal,' i.e., a wide-scope negation of existential quantification, this study reckons on the perspective that rhetorical questions may well count among linguistically non-trivial phenomena which bear on the long-standing issues such as negation, assertion, polarity, conditionals, quantification, and wh-interrogatives. Through the discussion, we set the scene about the communicative motivation by which what the speaker wants to assert in a negative pole is encoded within the conventionalized structural forms of rhetorical questions in English.