Don’t you think that a rhetorical question can convey an argument?

Abstract:

Rhetorical questions have been addressed from many different linguistic perspectives, however, their interactional role has been hitherto underexplored. We here present an exploratory study of rhetorical questions in a corpus of dialogues discussing a moral dilemma from an interactional perspective, using the notions of enthymemes and topoi. Results show that rhetorical questions are used to introduce enthymematic arguments and to facilitate linking together parts of arguments over several utterances.

Research areas:

• Dialogue
• Schizophrenia
• Reasoning
• DRiPS

Year:

2021

Type of Publication:

In Proceedings

Book title:

Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue