Research on Rhetorical Devices in German: The Use of Rhetorical Questions in Sales Presentations.

Previous literature recommends using stylistic (or rhetorical) devices in presentations such as rhetorical questions (RQs: Does anyone want bad teeth?) to make them more professional, to appear more charismatic, and to convince an audience. However, in oral presentations, it is not only the what that matters in using stylistic devices like RQs, but also the how, i.e., the RQs' prosodic realization. To date, however, virtually no handbook on the way of giving a good presentation scrutinizes this prosodic how. Therefore, our investigation focuses on the prosodic realization of German RQs in sales pitches. Specifically, we carry out a perception experiment in which 72 listeners rated both the sales pitch and its speaker based on presentations that contained questions that were lexically biased towards a rhetorical interpretation. They were realized with either the prosody of RQs or information-seeking questions (ISQs: What time is it?). An additional baseline condition was constituted by regular declarative statements with the corresponding prosody. More precisely, we investigate whether particular identified prosodic realizations-previously found for German RQs and ISQs-meet the listeners' expectation in the context of a presentation situation. We found that listeners prefer lexically marked RQs that are produced with a prosody that is characteristic of German ISQs. We therefore suggest that handbooks should provide their readers not only with clear definitions of RQs as a stylistic device in presentations (i.e., the what), but also with the respective prosodic realization (i.e., the how) to make them a properly implemented stylistic device.

The Prosody of Rhetorical and Information-Seeking Questions in German.

This paper reports on the prosody of rhetorical questions (RQs) and information-seeking questions (ISQs) in German for two question types-polar questions and constituent questions (henceforth "wh-questions"). The results are as follows: Phonologically, polar RQs were mainly realized with H-% (high plateau), while polar ISQs mostly ended in H-^H% (high-rise). Wh-RQs almost exclusively terminated in a low edge tone, whereas wh-ISQs allowed for more tonal variation (L-%, L-H%, H-^H%). Irrespective of question type, RQs were mainly produced with L*+H accents. Phonetically, RQs were more often realized with breathy voice quality than ISQs, in particular in the beginning of the interrogative. Furthermore, they were produced with longer constituent durations than ISQs, in particular at the end of the interrogative. While the difference between RQs and ISQs is reflected in the intonational terminus of the utterance, this does not happen in the way suggested in the semantic literature, and in addition, accent type and phonetic parameters also play a role. Crucially, a simple distinction between rising and falling intonation is insufficient to capture the realization of the different illocution types (RQs, ISQs), against frequent claims in the semantic and pragmatic literature. We suggest alternative ways to interpret the findings.