Re: rhetorically speaking

David Peterson said:
> 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?
As I sit here, I can think of two natlangs that clearly mark rhetorical
questions: American Sign Language and Cantonese. I'm sure there are many
others.

ASL marks them nonmanually (something about raised eyebrows and tilted
head) as well as syntactically (something about the way rhetorical
questions are embedded in the discourse structure). From what I can
gather, this marking is obligatory -- questions not so marked are intended
to be understood literally.

Cantonese can mark rhetorical questions by protracting the final 'm4'
interrogative particle. This doesn't seem to be an obligatory marking.


It would be interesting to know if there are any spoken or written
natlangs that have obligatory marking of rhetorical questions.


-- Mark

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