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Re: rhetorically speaking

From:David Peterson <thatbluecat@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 12, 2004, 17:58
Trinsic wrote:

<< Just a quick question for everyone,
I would think most (all?) of us have some way to mark or signify
question in our conlangs. What about rhetorical questions though,
questions that aren't questions? How do your conlangs treat those? Are
they lumped in with normal questions (as in English), are they marked
differently, or do they not exist at all?>>

I'd like to tack on a question to that.   Are there *any* natural languages
that consider rhetorical questions
significant enough to mark them separately?   Could it perhaps have arisen
naturally, where such questions
were always introduced by a phrase meaning something like, "Is it not so
that", and then this phrase got
reanalyzed as a marker of such questions, and was reduced to a single unit
(or not)?

-David
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Replies

Mark P. Line <mark@...>
Peter Bleackley <peter.bleackley@...>