Abstract
The current study aims to review the existing literature on rhetorical questions and to present effective ways to classify the subtypes of the rhetorical questions based on quasi-natural Spanish data such as TV drama. A rhetorical question can be considered a type of non-standard questions, because it takes the form of a question but has a similar or even stronger force than a statement and is not usually expected to answer. The reason for not expecting an answer is that the speaker is assumed to already know the answer, and the listener is believed to easily know the answer through inference. After a close review of previous studies on rhetorical questions, a checklist based on the lexico-syntactic, semantic, conversational, and discourse characteristics of rhetorical questions has been made. Toward the end, a couple of sample rhetorical questions extracted from actual Spanish dramas have been analyzed. This paper is expected to guide the firm ground for future empirical research on rhetorical questions in Spanish.
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