Rhetorical question as a communicative act

The present article deals with the study of the rhetorical question as a distinct communicative act, whose specificity lies in the speaker’s attempt to express their conviction regarding the nature of a certain fragment of the world and, if possible, convey this conviction to the listener. Therefore, a rhetorical question is not merely a question that does not require an answer but one that does not even allow for an answer. The particular communicative effect of a rhetorical question is achieved because the speaker makes an attempt to impose their conviction on the listener indirectly: the listener is encouraged to find the answer, which is already known to the speaker and encoded in the question itself. We propose distinguishing between three types of convictions that make up the content of a rhetorical question — qualifying, deontic, and assertive — and demonstrate that Russian possesses specific linguistic means to convey each type of conviction through a rhetorical question.