Abstract
Under the heading ‘rhetorical question’, very different kinds of sentences appear in grammars and manuals. The present paper starts from a logico-semantical definition based on the pragmatical determinedness of rhetorical questions (Belnap 1963) and limits the linguistic description to definite types exemplified in English, German, French, and Portuguese: the rhetorical use of question-answer-pairs, the auto-responsive rhetorical question, the implicative types of rhetorical question. Furthermore, particular attention is given to elliptical forms. Rhetorical questions, however, can be regarded not only as pseudo-assertions (because of their semantic nature): from a pragmatical and textual point of view, they function as answers (to genuine questions) as well, if so interpreted by the addressee. In a last section, it is discussed whether the complex utterance ‘rhetorical question’ may be regarded as an indirect speech act or not.
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