Perguntas retóricas no plenário do Supremo Tribunal Federal

• Ano de defesa: 2020
• Autor(a) principal: Barutti, Glauco Pedrosa
• Orientador(a): Neves, Maria Helena de Moura
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie
• Palavras-chave em Português: retórica; perguntas retóricas; conhecimento mútuo; polaridade; escalas pragmáticas; STF; acórdão
• Área do conhecimento CNPq: CNPQ::LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LINGUISTICA
• Link de acesso: http://dspace.mackenzie.br/handle/10899/26560

Rhetorical questions are among the distinct mechanisms that languages use to code a fine gradation between the assertive declarations and the genuine interrogative character of questions. Though it is not possible to assert the intentions of the speaker, in using rhetorical questions, he shows a persuasion strategy that consists of conducting the hearer towards an expected answer. For this peculiar character, rhetorical questions have been the object of study of some authors (PETTY et al, 1981; FRANK, 1990; HOWARD, 1990; HERRING, 1991; REXACH, 1998; SILVA; DOS SANTOS, 2015). In this work, we review and amplify the findings of these authors, through the identification of semantic-pragmatic elements that are part of the rhetorical questions found in judgements of the Supreme Court in Brazil. In this genre, rhetorical questions are a linguistic resource largely used, be it in the written votes or the debates of the ministers, one that offers a rich corpus for study. Aside from confirming previous findings, like the role of “negation”, “negative polarity items (NPIs) and positive polarity items (PPIs)” — that establish pragmatic scales — and the use of the “conditional” as semantic-pragmatic elements that point to the rhetorical character of some questions, we propose — and show — that “mutual knowledge” contributes to the persuasive strength, since the questions gain their rhetorical character in the mutually shared knowledge between speaker and hearer. We confirmed the hypothesis that, in the genre used for the study, “mutual knowledge” is the more abundant semantic-pragmatic element in the universe of the rhetorical questions.