This thesis takes the form of a pragmatic study of Rhetorical Questions (RQs) in the environment of monologue within the theoretical framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986). Two main research questions are involved. The first is how an addressee manages to identify the rhetorical nature of a question, and infer the possible intended assumptions of the addresser. I aim to show that the Code Model, which holds that communication is achieved by encoding and decoding messages in words, is not sufficient in interpreting RQs. In contrast, I shall show that implicatures (implied propositions) conveyed by an RQ can only be interpreted by an inferential model. The second question is how different types of RQ are used to achieve the addresser’s persuasive intention in monologic environments. My study consists not only of theoretical argumentation but also of a qualitative analysis of corpus data, in an attempt to extend corpus study to rhetoric and pragmatics, beyond the recent concentration (Sinclair, 1991; Biber et al., 1999; Stubbs, 2001a; Hunston, 2002; Renouf, 2013 etc.) on the lexical, semantic, and syntactic domains. The corpora consulted are the BNC and FLOB, complemented by two self-compiled textual corpora, comprising the genres of political speeches, newspaper editorials and sermons. In the first part of the study, I propose a procedure for identifying an RQ based mainly on the concepts of ‘implicature’, ‘mutual manifestness’ and ‘optimal relevance’ in Relevance Theory. In the second part, the proposed criteria are applied to the identification and interpretation of RQs in three monologic genres to analyse their uses, which display both common and distinctive features.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:732982 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Yang, Zhixia |
| Publisher | Birmingham City University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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