Rhetorical questions in colloquial Italian

Maria F. Ferin ^[1]
1. [1] University of Konstanz
  
  University of Konstanz
  
  Landkreis Konstanz, Alemania
Localización: Italian journal of linguistics, ISSN 1120-2726, Vol. 36, Nº. 1, 2024, págs. 65-102
Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
- Rhetorical questions (i.e. questions whose answer is indicated as obvious by the speaker) can be marked through a variety of lexical, (morpho)syntactic and prosodic cues that, directly or indirectly, trigger their rhetorical interpretation. The present article reports two studies investigating which cues can mark rhetorical questions in Italian, involving participants of different regional origins. In an elicited production study, negative-answer rhetorical wh-questions were marked through a variety of lexical and syntactic cues, the majority of which were not direct markers of rhetoricity, but were compatible with a wider range of noncanonical questions, such as negative biased questions or conjectural questions. In a forced-choice comprehension task, participants classified a question as rhetorical or canonical based either on prosody or a combination of prosodic and syntactic cues. Both studies show that, although some regional variation is present, the pattern of comprehension and production of (a sub-type of) rhetorical questions in Italian is consistent across varieties.