@article{Gutiérrez Rexach_1998, title={Rhetorical questions, relevance and scales}, url={https://raei.ua.es/article/view/1998-n11-rhetorical-questions-relevance-and-scales}, DOI={10.14198/raei.1998.11.11}, abstractNote={Rhetorical questions, and other varieties of pragmatically conditioned questions, present a challenge for a purely truth-conditional theory of the interpretation of interrogatives. In this paper, it is argued that relevance-theoretic principles account for the conditions of use of rhetorical questions. Concretely, it is proposed that a pragmatic principle, the "Bottom of Scale Principle", critically interacts with the Principle of Relevance and derives the dynamic meaning of the rhetorical use of a question. The Bottom of Scale Principle is also associated with the particular entailment and monotonicity properties of interrogatives, which explain the ability of rhetorical questions to license negative polarity items.}, number={11}, journal={Alicante Journal of English Studies / Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses}, author={Gutiérrez Rexach, Javier}, year={1998}, month={Nov.}, pages={139–155} }