An Experimental Pragmatic Study of Gradability of Negative Implicature and (Im) politeness in Rhetorical Questions

This paper aims to explore the interrelationship between the gradability of negative implicatures and that of (im)politeness by drawing on the data, specifically, rhetorical questions as responses,from computer-mediated communications (CMC).The findings reveal that (1) rhetorical questions are often used to express negative implicatures; that (2) rhetorical questions, explicit negations and implicit negations are arranged from the strongest to the weakest in expressing negative implicatures; that (3) rhetorical questions, implicit negations and explicit negations are ranked from the weakest to the strongest in terms of their (im)politeness in interpersonal interactions.The study suggests that more indirect utterances may not produce more politeness in Chinese interpersonal interactions, but on the contrary, more direct utterances tend to be more polite when it comes to expressing negative implicatures.In addition, the present study provides experimental evidence for the interrelationship between politeness constructions and linguistic choices.