Are You Always this Stupid or Are You Making a Special Effort Today?: The Structure and Function of Conventional and Innovative Insulting Rhetorical Questions
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2014
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Abstract
The purpose of this paper will be to detail the inherent paradox that exists in trying to
form an insulting rhetorical question (IRQ), and two separate syntactic and semantic methods
which work to circumvent this paradox and produce felicitous insulting rhetorical questions. The
paradox of insulting rhetorical questions is that the requirements for a successful rhetorical
question and the requirements for a successful insult appear to be mutually exclusive. In order
for a rhetorical question to be felicitous, both participants in the discourse must have an identical
or similar answer to the rhetorical question stated, and this collaboration is necessary for the
success of a rhetorical question (Ilie 1994 ). In order for an insult to be successful, however, there
is necessarily a lack of collaboration between the insulter and the insultee (Neu 2008). This
necessity of agreement in rhetorical questions and necessity of non-agreement in insults makes it
appear at first as if insulting rhetorical questions would be impossible to form.
I will argue that there are two ways in which insulting rhetorical questions can be formed
to overcome this paradox. The first is the use of presuppositions within an innovative structure in
an IRQ. In these, the insulting material is presupposed, meaning that any canonical answer to the
IRQ will contain the insult, thus forcing "agreement" between the insulter and the insultee in a
formal semantic way and overcoming the paradox. The second is the use of conventional
structures in IRQs, which are syntactic structures that force an insulting reading no matter what
material is inserted into the structure, also overcoming the paradox. My conclusions in this paper
will expand the research on insulting rhetorical questions and hopefully provide a clear and
concise explanation of how these IRQs function semantically.