On Rhetorical Questions and Their Constraints in English and Japanese - An Exploration of Uniformity and Variability of Human Languages (2) -

Rhetorical Questions (RQs) have been known to behave differently in English and Japanese. We argue that the differences can be attributed to the fact that RQs in English (RQE) do not have the same syntactic structure as those in Japanese (RQJ). While there is no morphological/syntactic clausal marking in RQE, sentence-final expressions in RQJ have a function similar to the complement of “verbs of saying.” Based on the arguments in Inada and Imanishi (2016), we claim that the constraints on multiple-wh-sentences and the other unique properties in English and Japanese RQs should be reduced to the syntactic/morphological properties of the two different language types.