Hello people,
So, having dinner the other night with some friends, we got into random conversations about rhetorical questions and after a few "glasses" there was a lot of fog surrounding the rules that apply to it. So, I thought, why not...and here you have it...we are going to discuss two kinds of peculiar questions. Isn’t
that going to be fun! "Isn't that going to be fun," is a rhetorical
question, by the way:) We’re also going to learn about its cousin. That’s called a tag
question (It's going to be fun, isn't it?).
Rhetorical Questions
You’ve probably heard rhetorical questions more often than you realise.
You start a sentence with a negative word when you mean something positive. So
“Wasn’t that movie great?” means that you think the movie was great. It seems
counterintuitive, but that’s the way English works. It’s called a rhetorical
question, and it can end in either a question mark or an exclamation
point, and in dialogue you can sometimes even have a speaker’s
rhetorical question end in a period.
Another example of a rhetorical question is “Isn’t she leaving?” That
question means you think the woman is leaving, but you want to confirm.
Rhetorical questions like this take a negative form. If you make the “Isn’t she
leaving?” question positive, it becomes just a regular question: “Is she
leaving?” If you ask "Is she leaving?" you don’t know the answer;
whereas with the rhetorical question “Isn’t she leaving?” you are assuming she
is leaving.
Rhetorical questions have popped up in pop music. Stevie Wonder, for
example, wrote a famous song called “Isn’t She Lovely,” whose lyrics begin:
“Isn't she
lovely,
Isn't she
wonderful,
Isn't she
precious,” (2)
Mr Wonder definitely thinks the girl is lovely, wonderful, and precious.
No question about that.
These kinds of rhetorical questions seem to be quite conversational. You
wouldn’t want to write, “Aren’t I the perfect person for this job?” in a job
cover letter, nor would you want to say, “Isn’t it obvious that you should hire
me?” in an interview. There are better ways to sound more qualified and
more professional. So, Aaron: no, it’s not advisable to use this kind of
construction in formal situations.
Tag Questions
The second kind of question we’re talking about is called a tag
question. “Tag questions, a peculiarity of English, are usually more spoken rather
than written. The rhetorical
question “Isn't she leaving?” means about the same thing as “She is leaving,
isn’t she?” Students who are learning English often find this kind of
construction puzzling because the speaker uses a negative form to mean
something positive. As the Interesting Thing of the Day website
wisely explains, “The simplest way to make a tag question in English is to
repeat the verb, negate it, and then repeat the subject. For example, ‘He is
smart’ becomes ‘He is smart, isn’t he?" Note how the word
"isn't" is negating the verb "is" from the first part of
the sentence: "He IS smart, ISN'T he?"
"If the verb is already negative, you just make it positive. ‘It
won’t rain’ becomes ‘It won’t rain, will it?’" So, if we wanted to change
Aaron’s rhetorical question “Isn’t it funny?” into a tag question, we would
say, “It’s funny, isn’t it?” Both sentences mean “I think it’s funny.”
One clue that tag questions are best left to informal situations is that
you often hear them used with contractions, which themselves are a bit
informal. It would sound weird to ask "It will not rain, will it?" It
sounds much more normal with a contraction: "It won't rain, will it?"
Summary
In summary, rhetorical questions and tag questions are normal parts of
everyday speech, but they are informal. It’s therefore best to avoid them in
formal situations.
Enjoy!!
-S
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