Ways and means of expressing one’s views and the art of persuasion to one’s arguments have been objects of interest for the researchers of language and communication for a long time now. The paper presents the presence of rhetorical questions in German public discourse. Rhetorical questions have a persuasive function especially in the speeches of politicians and their full understanding depends on the knowledge of a broader extra-linguistic context. Although such questions appear in various forms, they reveal certain regularities which serve as indicators of their “rheroricity”. Besides new, occasional constructions in the German language we can also find lexicalized and conventional sentences. In the paper I aim at a verification of the rhetorical questions typology taking onto consideration the sentences noted in lexicography. Despite the great interest of phraseologists in various rhetorical devices (cf. DIETZ 1999) lexicalized rhetorical questions have not be adequately researched and described as yet.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.