English Rhetorical Questions In The Light Of The Adaptation Theory

English rhetorical questions have long captured the interests from scholars. Traditional studies focus on the perspectives of rhetoric and grammar. Rhetoricians regard English rhetorical questions as a trope to realize persuasion while grammarians center on describing grammatical transmutation and transformational generation of English rhetorical questions. Recently, with the prosperity of Pragmatics, English rhetorical questions are analyzed as results of linguistic communications influenced by various pragmatic factors, either from the angle of speech act, cooperation and politeness principle, discourse analysis, or relevance theory, thus enriching the relevant studies. However, a review of the studies reveals that, due to the fact that scholars possess different approaches and attitudes, there is a lack of consistent and systematic pragmatic framework for the analysis of English rhetorical questions, leaving some important questions thereof unanswerable. For example, what is the very nature of English rhetorical questions? What is the mechanism for producing them? How are English rhetorical questions interpreted and responded to and what are the underlying reasons?The research presents a pragmatic framework for a consistent and systematic analysis of English rhetorical question. The core is the formulation of a theoretical adaptation model and a detailed analysis of producing, interpreting and responding to rhetorical questions, illustrated by quantities of vivid examples.Based on Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory (1999), which claims that the use of language is a process of choices and adaptation and that a general perspective, namely the linguistic, cognitive, socio-cultural perspective, is resorted to understand the process, the theoretical framework is specified by integrating features of rhetorical questions. The framework defines English rhetorical questions, a special linguistic phenomenon characterized by the disagreement between the form and the function, to clarify the very nature of the notion, and explains conceptually "what people do when using rhetorical questions ".