On Rhetorical Questions in English and Japanese - An Exploration of Uniformity and Variability of Human Languages (1) -
Rhetorical questions (RQs), generally considered as questions with an illocutionary force of a strong assertion of opposite polarity, do not show the same pattern in different languages. They behave differently in languages like Japanese, where clause types can be marked by sentence-final particles, and languages like English, where there is no mor...