Las preguntas retóricas en el discurso políticoun estudio multimodal inglés/español

Abstract

Abstract Rhetorical questions are one of the most traditional resources of rhetorical discourse, their use having been documented since classical antiquity. At present, it is still a widely used mechanism, especially in speeches whose communicative function is persuasion, such as advertising or political speech. This study addresses an analysis of rhetorical questions in political discourse from the theoretical perspective of Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995, 2006). The objectives of the thesis are: (a) to try to establish the linguistic and contextual mechanisms that allow us to recognize a question as rhetoric; (b) observe the differences and similarities in the structure of rhetorical questions in English and Spanish and (c) analyze the possible differences in the use of this mechanism by Anglophone and Spanish politicians. The work will include in this line recent advances in Construction Grammar that advocate for including multimodal information in their analysis, such as gestures or intonation (Turner & Steen 2012), therefore, we will have the help of the use of the database of different audiovisual media, both Spanish and English.