Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1 Professor of Department of Persian Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Qom, Qom, Iran.
2 PhD student in Persian Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Qom, Qom, Iran.
Abstract
One of the criteria for dividing a sentence is the meaning, role, and function of the sentences. An interrogative sentence is a type of this division in which the speaker expresses it with the intention of receiving an answer, rhetorical purposes, and other functions. An interrogative sentence appears in different varieties of language. In traditional rhetoric, the function of a question that serves a purpose other than a direct answer is called a rhetorical question. In linguistics, the roles of such sentences are studied in Pragmatic Semantics. In this qualitative study, with the aim of identifying the purposes and functions of rhetorical questions in contemporary Persian prose, we examined 25 texts including novels, stories, screenplays, newspapers, and non-fiction books and extracted types of rhetorical questions from them. We extracted a total of 77 rhetorical purposes from the studied texts, which show greater diversity compared to the purposes mentioned in rhetoric books. These purposes were classified into 8 general categories: emotional, confrontational-critical, persuasive-motivational, demanding, emphatic, judgmental-evaluative, communicative, and philosophical. The findings of this study show that in today's written language, interrogative sentences have gained a prominent presence with new approaches in a range of different texts. According to the classification of this research and the selection of texts from various literary and non-literary texts, the most indirect functions of these sentences are in the emphatic-persuasive, emotional, communicative, and confrontational-critical categories, respectively. This variety of functions is in line with the content of the selected texts.
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