Rhetorical use

The third and last basic use that I present here is the rhetorical use. This use has been previ-ously discussed from the perspective of the bound additives–kinand–kAAn(Karttunen and Kart-tunen, 1976). However, it seems that this use is also possible with the unbound additivesmyös andmyöskään. Hence, it is here classified as basic. Like the confirming use presented in the pre-vious section, this use will not be discussed again in section 5.2, where I propose an entry for the additive operator relevant for basic uses, and give example derivations for the simplest examples.

Extending the proposal to cover the rhetorical uses is more complex in the case of the rhetorical use than with the confirming use, but I leave this task for another occasion.

In general, rhetorical questions are characterised by uninformativity (Rohde, 2006): their an-swer is so obvious – to both the speaker and the addressee – that the question itself need not be explicitly answered.⁷ In their discussion of the rhetorical use of–kinand–kAAn, Karttunen and Karttunen (1976) include both polar andwh-type rhetorical questions. The authors propose that depending on which rhetorical question formation rule is used, the interpretation of the ques-tion includes a (possibly convenques-tional) implicature that the speaker is confident that the root sentence is true (rhetoricalpolar questions (179a)) or that the speaker believes that the universal closure of the scope with its polarity reversed is true (rhetoricalwh-questions (179b-c)).

In other words, for Karttunen and Karttunen, bound additives contribute their usual basic use additive meaning on the rhetorical use. Thus, (179a) presupposes that someone (distinct from Marja) likes Jussi, and implicates that the speaker is confident about Marja liking Jussi. In

7See Rohde, 2006 for a review of different approaches to rhetorical questions (Sadock, 1971; Ladusaw, 1980; van Rooy, 2003). Following van Rooy (2003), Rohde (2006) argues that rhetorical questions have a question denotation, and that they do not denote assertions of the opposite polarity, as has been previously argued.

4.1. Basic uses

the same way, (179b) presupposes that there is someone (distinct from Jussi) thatno onelikes (negative-polarity universal implicature), and (179c) presupposes that there is someone (distinct from Jussi) thateveryonelikes (positive-polarity universal implicature).

(179) Rhetorical questions with–kinand–kAAn (Karttunen and Karttunen, 1976, p. 109)

a. E-i-kö [confidence implicature]

NEG-3SG-Q

‘Doesn’t Marja like Jussi too?’

b. Kuka [negative universal implicature]

who.NOM

pitä-isi like-COND.3SG

Jussi-sta-kaan?

Jussi-ELA-ADD

‘Who would like Jussi either?’

c. Kuka [positive universal implicature]

who.NOM

‘Who would not like Jussi too?’

The corresponding versions with unbound additives are given in (180). These give rise to the same implicatures (in Karttunen and Karttunen’s terms) as the examples in (179).

(180) Rhetorical questions withmyösandmyöskään(Karttunen and Karttunen, 1976, p. 109)

a. E-i-kö [confidence implicature]

NEG-3SG-Q

‘Doesn’t Marja like Jussi too?’

b. Kuka [negative universal implicature]

who.NOM

‘Who would like Jussi either?’

c. Kuka [positive universal implicature]

who.NOM

‘Who would not like Jussi too?’

If the additive presuppositions of rhetoricalwh-questions are as described by Karttunen and Karttunen (1976), the use of bound additives should be felicitous when the context contains an antecedent with universal quantificational force and the right polarity. This is indeed the case, as shown in (181) (with bound additives).

(181) Rhetorical questions with universal antecedents:–kinand–kAAn

‘Nobody likes Trump. And who would like Putin either?’

b. Kaikki

‘Everyone likes Trump. And who wouldn’t like Putin too?’

It is also possible for the antecedent to be another rhetorical question, as in (182). This is expected if the implicature (i.e. the universal statement) that arises from the first rhetorical question may function as an antecedent for the additive in the second rhetorical question.

(182) Rhetorical questions with rhetorical question antecedents a. Kuka

‘Who would like Trump? And who would like Putin either?’

b. Kuka

‘Who wouldn’t like Trump? And who wouldn’t like Putin too?’

As expected, the universal nature of Karttunen and Karttunen’s presuppositions for the rhetorical use makes antecedents that name a single individual infelicitous, as shown in (183).

4.1. Basic uses

(183) Rhetorical questions with individual-naming antecedents a. #Joni

‘Joni does not like Trump. But who would like Putin either?’

b. #Joni

‘Joni likes Trump. And who wouldn’t like Putin too?’

Karttunen and Karttunen propose that in rhetoricalwh-questions, the form of the additive is determined by the polarity of the ‘input’ or ‘root’ sentence; thus, with–kinandmyös, the input sentence is positive, and with–kAAnandmyöskään, the input sentence is negative. The rhetorical wh-question formation rule reverts the surface polarity of the question. Moreover, this rule is responsible for the universal closure implicature, which comes to affect the form of the additive meaning as well (Karttunen and Karttunen, 1976, p. 112).

In conclusion, the rhetorical use of bound additives has been argued to involve a universal closure implicature which also affects the meaning contributed by additives (Karttunen and Kart-tunen, 1976). Karttunen and Karttunen themselves analyse additive meaning as a conventional implicature, and explicitly state that it corresponds to a universal statement with reversed po-larity (with respect to the surface form). This presupposition can be satisfied by both universal antecedents and rhetorical question antecedents. As mentioned at the beginning of this section, although I assume that the same lexical entry that I provide for the additive operator associated with the basic use in this dissertation is also at play in the semantics of the rhetorical use of addi-tives, I will not give a formal extension of the proposal to this use in chapter 5, but leave this work for the future.

4.1.4 Summary

In this section, I discussed basic uses of additives that are available with both the unbound addi-tivesmyösandmyöskäänand the bound additives–kinand–kAAn. While the latter two always appear as attached to their semantic associate, the former pair has a wider syntactic distribution.

I also presented an argument against the polarity approach to the form alternation question.

In particular, polarity approach incorrectly predicts thatmyöskäänand–kAAntake scope under the deontic modaltullathat itself scopes above negation. This prediction was shown not to be borne out. In this dissertation, I adopt the scope approach to the form alternation question (cf.

Karttunen and Karttunen, 1976; Karttunen and Peters, 1979), although, as chapter 4 will show, the driving force behind the movement of any additive operators is not sentence polarity.

Besides the very basic use of unbound and bound additives, I also discussed their confirming and rhetorical uses. The former use involves an F-marked verb, and what seem to be classifiable as modal alternatives. This use has previously been analysed as being closely related to the po-lar use, although this section has showed that only the former is available with both bound and unbound additives. The rhetorical use is special in that it involves questions – either polar orwh – and results in a presupposition that involves universal quantification and a polarity reversal.

The in-depth formal analysis of these uses as representatives of the basic use is left for another occasion, and will not be included in chapter 5.