Rhetorical Questions: a Multimodal Analysis of British and American Talk Shows

Abstract

In this thesis, I investigate the production of nonstandard interrogatives in the English language, more specifically, my research aims to individuate rhetorical questions in British and American talk shows. After individuating them, I distribute them into different categories, namely yes-no questions and -wh questions. The aim of this investigation is to analyze the prosodical and gestural components of the rhetorical questions and successively compare their properties with previous studies.